Month: September 2013

“ interpretive community” in Fish’s essay

In his essay, Fish addresses the reasons behind why the same reader will interpret different texts in different ways, and also why different readers will interpret the same text in a similar way if each reader interprets a text independently. In order to give an explanation on the one hand of the stability of interpretation and on the other of the orderly variety of interpretation, Fish proposes the theory of “ interpretive community”. According to Fish, the interpretive community is “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions”. (219). Each interpretive community share its own reading methodology and therefore depending to which interpretive community the readers belong, they make certain shared assumptions prior to the process of reading that influence their interpretation of the texts. This is the explanation for the stability of interpretation among different readers in the same interpretive community and why there are disagreements between different communities.

In my opinion, Fish is saying that the readers hold all the power in determining the interpretation, and both authorial intention and formal features are produced by their interpretive assumptions and procedures the readers bring to the text (basing on their personal experiences, cultural background and knowledge, rather than on the formal elements of the texts themselves to determine the way a work is interpreted, and what it means). The reader’s interpretive perceptions and the skills that one uses to interpret works are individually learned, and developed as they are traits that are not inherently with us; and depend on the assumptions shared by the interpretative community that the reader belongs, which explains why some of us interpret things a different way than others.

I understand and agree with Fish that certain nuances in meaning are subjective and projected onto the text by the reader, but are we to completely ignore authorial intention?

Categories
Barthes Foucault

In Defense of the Author – Let Him/Her Live!

Both Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What Is an Author” are very stimulating, insightful texts that do exactly what Dr. Freilick identified as one of the primary  goals of this course – they make us question our assumptions. I strongly believe that this is a foundational exercise of our education and I have always been an avid proponent of the practice of sharply questioning what you believe and what you know.

Having said that, when it comes to soundly convincing me, both of these texts – considered either individually or in conjunction – have a limited effect. I have been exposed to them before in English Lit courses and I made a conscious effort to approach the texts open-mindedly, trying to erase my memories of the fact that they did not sway me in the past either, as it has now been a few years since Intro to Literary Analysis in my English major and consequently more exposure to literature, both of the English and Hispanic worlds. However, I find myself somewhat at odds with some of the arguments that the texts put forth. I agree that the author is a product of society, and I definitely do not believe in seeking the “explanation of a work in the man or woman who produced it” (Barthes 143) – as I believe that that is a very dangerous and pointless trap, as we were discussing in class during out last meeting. This is also certainly a very tempting path to take; I have found myself forcing an interpretation on a text because of socio-historic and biographical information that we have the privilege of knowing about the author – and I have to at times actively stop myself from doing this.

However, I do not believe that we have yet reached – and I wonder if we ever will – the point at which  language can ‘act’ and ‘perform’ in a completely empty vacuum. As Barthes points out, Surrealism did indeed contribute to a desacrilization of the Author through its characteristic ‘jolt’, the practice of automatic writing, and the principle and experience of several individuals writing together, yet can Surrealism ever be fully separated from André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (yes, I do choose to see them as ‘authors’)? In my opinion, to do so would be to also bring about a loss – while we must take every caution to not let historical and biographical information overshadow and control our view of a work, I believe that it can enrich it. A piece of literature can certainly stand independent of its socio-political context, but is it not also true that grasping this context might also be beneficial? I believe that this is particularly true in texts that share an intrinsic link to moments in history and political movements – for example, as I am conducting my thesis research on the Spanish Civil War, I cannot imagine getting a holistic picture of the literary texts (and films) that I am analyzing without having first understood the historical context of the times. When it comes to Barthes’ argument that once the Author is removed, “the claim to decipher a text becomes futile” (147), I am also not sure I agree – one can certainly parse a text and engage in an exercise of ‘interpretation’ without working in the dimension of the Author.

One portion of Barthes’ argument that I very much admire, however, is his concluding call for making the reader “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (148) and his proposition that the unity of a text lies “not in its origin but in its destination” (148). I think this highly crucial to the practice of reading, but I am just not convinced that it absolutely has to come at the expense of the death of the Author; is there no space for the co-existence of both the birth of the reader and the death of the Author? Undoubtedly such an argument does not pack the rhetorical punch of setting up a ‘life/death’ dichotomy as Barthes unequivocally does in the closing sentence of “The Death of the Author,” but I believe that this is much closer to where the field stands at this time – in my personal experience at UBC.

To answer Beckett’s question, I do believe that it does matter who is speaking, and while the work may possess “the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka” (Foucault 102), I don’t believe that it has. As we have the advantage of time and hindsight (only up to the present date, of course), we can ask ourselves if “as our society change[d], the author function will disappear” (119). Have we “no longer hear[d] the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity and originality […]” (119)? I would venture to answer that on the contrary, these are questions that still very much continue to dominate our contemporary literary discourse – just one example would be the relatively recently released film Anonymous (2011) (the film essentially presents the possibility that Shakespeare did not actually write any of the works that are attributed to him). Any B.A. student at UBC who wants to obtain an English Lit major must meet the requirement of taking a 3 credit course focused on either Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare – bringing to mind the infamous ‘cannon’ debate. However, what is most important thing to keep in mind is not the obligations of an English Lit degree, but whether or not this is a damaging thing to inflict on students, a negatively-impacting the-Author-is-very-much-alive type of view – and to that, my answer is a resounding ‘no’.

In order to achieve a cohesive understanding of our assumptions, we cannot push aside questions of “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?” (120). these are the fundamental questions to the practice of questioning assumptions and sharply analyzing and also questioning the world around us – and my argument is that the birth of the reader does not have to come at the expense of the death of the author; an in-between space is indeed possible, and I believe that this is what we achieve in the literature classes that make up the Master’s and PhD programs that we are currently enrolled in.

Categories
Barthes

“What is an Author” or “What is a reader”

Categories
Barthes

Is his death necessary?

I remember that when I was in elementary school, the most common question in the tales that were on the textbooks of Literature was: “What does the author wants to say?” Roland Barthes would find this question terrible, castrating. And so do I. I think that the question should be: “What does the text says to you?” In Literature (and in Art in general), nobody has the last word. The interpretation that one could give to a text is as valid as the idea the author has of it. I remember a Peruvian writer who attended to a conference about one of his novels. At the end he said: “I didn’t know that I wanted to say so many things.” So, I agree with Barthes that we shouldn’t give to the author the category of “God”, the one who has the last and real opinion or interpretation of a text.

But I can’t agree with Bathes when he radicalizes his argument and says: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). Really? In my opinion, the problem of this asseveration is its generalization. Sometimes, knowing the author, his biography, his possible intentions and other details that surround his work, far from “close” the interpretation, gives new clues. I will illustrate my point with an example. The following is a poem of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (here is the English translation: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15272):

A MI HERMANO MIGUEL
In memoriam

Hermano, hoy estoy en el poyo de la casa.

Donde nos haces una falta sin fondo!

Me acuerdo que jugábamos esta hora, y que mamá

nos acariciaba: “Pero, hijos…”



Ahora yo me escondo,

como antes, todas estas oraciones

vespertinas, y espero que tú no des conmigo.

Por la sala, el zaguán, los corredores.

Después, te ocultas tú, y yo no doy contigo.

Me acuerdo que nos hacíamos llorar,

hermano, en aquel juego.



Miguel, tú te escondiste

una noche de agosto, al alborear;

pero, en vez de ocultarte riendo, estabas triste.

Y tu gemelo corazón de esas tardes

extintas se ha aburrido de no encontrarte. Y ya

cae sombra en el alma.



Oye, hermano, no tardes

en salir. Bueno? Puede inquietarse mamá.

(source: http://www.literatura.us/vallejo/completa.html)

Of course, one could give an interpretation of this poem without knowing anything of the author and his life. But, it is not casual, I think, that in many of the critical editions of the poems of Vallejo and in the university classes about him, is taught that he actually had an older brother named Miguel who died tragically in 1915 and that in some editions appears that “In memoriam”. This fact help us to understand better the poem, to decipher the ambiguity that the poetic voice creates with the game of hide and seek that is presented in the verses. So, knowing this, “impose a limit on that text”? I think not. On the contrary, it gives an important clue and opens the interpretation to many more variants (the notions of death that could be underlined, the not acceptance of it, the sense of absence, the love between brothers, etc.).

In my opinion, Barthes makes an important contribution highlighting that the readers have the power to appropriate the text. Taking his metaphor that the Author is like the father of the text, we could say that, as Son, the text has his own life, creates his own relations with the readers. But, saying that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148) seems too much to me. The author could provide an important approach, no the definitive, but at least something to take into consideration. In synthesis, we should make a demystification of the author, but not “kill” him.

[César Vallejo and his last wife, Georgette, in Paris, where he was auto-exiled from 1923 until his death in 1938]

Flipping the coin

This week’s readings brought me to the other equally complex and contested side of the spectrum: the reader and the meanings created from a text. Barthes’ call for the birth of the reader at expenses of the death of the author (p.148) and Foucault’s reflection on how the society insists on perpetuating the ideological construction of the author despite the efforts of modern criticism and philosophy, reminded me a discussion about Jorge Luis Borges, short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote where the main character re-writes this work and the text is seen as a completely different text. This to say, echoing Barthes again, that the text is eternally written here and now, or Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality when stating that a text is a mosaic of quotations, or the transformation of other texts. Borges uses a narrator that praises Menard’s innovative style of the “rudimentary art of the work (of art)”, hinting that a new reading of a text is, in fact, like re-writing the text.

This only generates more questions as writer and reader are two sides of the same coin, the text. Who is the reader? An abstract concept as Barthes implied: “someone without history, biography, psychology” (p.148) as a recipient that brings text to life through their interpretation? or the product of embodied social structures that cannot see beyond these systems of classifications where they are located and in which they locate/undersdant texts? Is the author’s own structures being reflected on his work and being used to reproduce social order? How can we break this trap? Can we break it?

Flipping the coin

This week’s readings brought me to the other equally complex and contested side of the spectrum: the reader and the meanings created from a text. Barthes’ call for the birth of the reader at expenses of the death of the author (p.148) and Foucault’s reflection on how the society insists on perpetuating the ideological construction of the author despite the efforts of modern criticism and philosophy, reminded me a discussion about Jorge Luis Borges, short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote where the main character re-writes this work and the text is seen as a completely different text. This to say, echoing Barthes again, that the text is eternally written here and now, or Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality when stating that a text is a mosaic of quotations, or the transformation of other texts. Borges uses a narrator that praises Menard’s innovative style of the “rudimentary art of the work (of art)”, hinting that a new reading of a text is, in fact, like re-writing the text.

This only generates more questions as writer and reader are two sides of the same coin, the text. Who is the reader? An abstract concept as Barthes implied: “someone without history, biography, psychology” (p.148) as a recipient that brings text to life through their interpretation? or the product of embodied social structures that cannot see beyond these systems of classifications where they are located and in which they locate/undersdant texts? Is the author’s own structures being reflected on his work and being used to reproduce social order? How can we break this trap? Can we break it?

Categories
Fish

L’auteur est mort…À l’assassin Colonel Mustard!!

This week, Fish offered me a new and broader perspective on the exercise of reading in a clear detailed way. For Fish, reading implies interpretation, that is finding themes and conferring meaning to them, which, ultimately, allow the recognition or the formation of «formal» units. For Fish, the reader is the true producer of literary […]

Literary Theory – Thoughts, Ideas, and More 2013-09-15 23:27:00

Oh Mon Dieu....I mean Bourdieu,


After the discussion last week regarding signified and signifier, the meaning of a work, and even beauty…..(anne-claire J ). It was interesting to see the different take this week. It delved into much of what Moustapha was saying in that yes there may be an underlying meaning behind certain things but in the end it is us, the audience, the people buying the books, the people reading the works, that interpret it as we see fit. The view that we take on is not only influenced by our experiences and knowledge but lack there. Not many people, including myself, may understand the works of many well-known authors in literature. It is not for lack of trying but perhaps lack of previous experience (in my case… I will own up to that), lack of education, or even lack of interest.

Either way, it is us who decide what is great and what is not….of course, one could argue that there are other external factors that come into play, especially now of days. With all the hoop-la in the world, it seems that many authors have gained a large amount of exposure and fame due to their financial benefactors and supporters. Such attention can turn the sales of a book from 100s to 1,000s to millions in little to no time at all. Of course, this then leads to the questions: Do the sales of a book determine its value against other books? Which then leads to…what is the value of a book and how is it truly established?

I feel that Bourdieu would say that the value of the book relies on people’s tastes, which are sometimes shaped by the social order they have created for themselves or have come to accept as truth…. or am I way off?

I found his take on social order to be very interesting. I can admit that I myself have come to seeing things in certain ways due to personal experiences within society. For example, while working at a private school in Houston, I came to learn what real “designer” bags, shoes, and clothes looked like and meant to the mothers of the children attending our school. And, I even witnessed many instances in which parents spoke differently to one another after looking at artificial things such as one’s attire, car, etc. They seemed to have categorized other people into social classes lower than their own. All I can say is that I hope never to be a member of such a group…or am I part of one and don’t know it Bourdieu? 

Literary Theory – Thoughts, Ideas, and More 2013-09-15 23:27:00

Oh Mon Dieu....I mean Bourdieu,


After the discussion last week regarding signified and signifier, the meaning of a work, and even beauty…..(anne-claire J ). It was interesting to see the different take this week. It delved into much of what Moustapha was saying in that yes there may be an underlying meaning behind certain things but in the end it is us, the audience, the people buying the books, the people reading the works, that interpret it as we see fit. The view that we take on is not only influenced by our experiences and knowledge but lack there. Not many people, including myself, may understand the works of many well-known authors in literature. It is not for lack of trying but perhaps lack of previous experience (in my case… I will own up to that), lack of education, or even lack of interest.

Either way, it is us who decide what is great and what is not….of course, one could argue that there are other external factors that come into play, especially now of days. With all the hoop-la in the world, it seems that many authors have gained a large amount of exposure and fame due to their financial benefactors and supporters. Such attention can turn the sales of a book from 100s to 1,000s to millions in little to no time at all. Of course, this then leads to the questions: Do the sales of a book determine its value against other books? Which then leads to…what is the value of a book and how is it truly established?

I feel that Bourdieu would say that the value of the book relies on people’s tastes, which are sometimes shaped by the social order they have created for themselves or have come to accept as truth…. or am I way off?

I found his take on social order to be very interesting. I can admit that I myself have come to seeing things in certain ways due to personal experiences within society. For example, while working at a private school in Houston, I came to learn what real “designer” bags, shoes, and clothes looked like and meant to the mothers of the children attending our school. And, I even witnessed many instances in which parents spoke differently to one another after looking at artificial things such as one’s attire, car, etc. They seemed to have categorized other people into social classes lower than their own. All I can say is that I hope never to be a member of such a group…or am I part of one and don’t know it Bourdieu? 
Categories
Barthes

About the Dead of the Author and the Endless Cycle of the Reader

Barthes proposal elaborates about who should defines the act of literature. He defends the idea that the Author is “a modern figure” that has been supported by the positivism,  the culmination of capitalism, and now (in 1967), he argues literature can not rely on the Author but the Reader. The Author, says Barthes, is “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). The Reader, however is a “space” where all the quotations holds together and all the traces find a field.

I agree a lot with Barthes. It is true that the Author became in a mercantilist object, a name who can probably sells or not. For instance, Joanne Rowling had to change her name to J. K. Rowling so it could be most “memorable” for readers. As you probably know, many publishers analyze the names of Authors for marketing process, because is not a person whose name will appear on the cover of a book, is a “brand”, you are selling a product.

I agree also with the idea that critic uses to rely on how to identify episodes of the novels with the real life of the authors. It is pretty common. And easier. Sometimes readers need to feel that behind those amazing stories is a real person who lived those actions, therefore, they empathize with the Author because it seems that not everything that he or she wrote was really made up.

Sometimes, literature itself, disputes the idea of what is an author. In Summertime (2009) J. M. Coetzee, South African writer and Literature Nobel Prize 2003, presents the third part of what it is known as his fictionalised autobiographical trilogy (the first and second parts were Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes of Provincial Life II (2002)). The novel was built with different points of view: some of them are interviews that a journalist carry out with the purpose of finding out how was the life of the writer J. M. Coetzee, who is already dead when the interviews take place, once he returned from USA to South Africa; some parts seems like notebook notes, a diary written by John Coetzee, where the readers can see ideas that spin around John Coetzee’s mind. In the book occurs something unusual for a autobiography: John Coetzee is created from many perspectives. Old lovers or acquaintances tend to describe John Coetzee as a cold, aloof, and odd man. Some says that he was really into languages. None of them remember him as an attractive or handsome man.

The intriguing fact here is that the “autobiography” is written by J. M. Coetzee, so he is making fiction to deconstruct the link that relates the character John Coetzee with the real writer J. M. Coetzee. Is also known that Coetzee does not offer many interviews and he do not talk much about his real life. Here, then, he offers a fictionalised idea of his life, that maybe has some brushstrokes of his reality, and maybe those readers who want to relate his fiction with reality can be a little satisfied.

Second, I know the Reader is an abstract idea on Barthes’ essay. However I can not stop thinking who could ever be that reader. Are all of us readers or only a selected group of people, who really knows that quotations and traces, can be? When Barthes said that the reader is a “space” I wonder if is a metaphor of a library, the Borges paradise. Or perhaps that idea of the Reader is Borges himself, this incredible good memory reader who, in spite of his blindness, was also a writer. I am thinking if we can be those kind of Readers. I do not have Borges’ memory, I do not belong to that elite where he grew up and belonged, I do not speak the languages that he spoke. Maybe I am a reader not a READER.

Perhaps the Reader is this ideal person who can discover a text and try to identify it. Wait: is not that a critic? But if the critics are only dedicated to the “task of discovering the author” (147), can be a critic a Reader or not? I am actually not sure about the definition of Reader.  I am not sure if Barthes is talking about the reader as an human being that still is “pure” and “naive”, and only reads for pleasure, and in this condition can interpret the reading with a clarity that a critics are not longer able to use because they have been corrupted for the critic’s vision.

In this order of ideas, maybe that Reader, still naive and pure, will probably need to identify himself or herself with the Author, and will try to find the Author behind his or her work… And the cycle will never ends.

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