Exploring Literary Theory

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.

Hello everyone,

I like the way we’ve been introduced to the world of literary and cultural theory with this first round of readings. The one notion that I find myself thinking about most after completing the readings is one that I’ve always found most fascinating about literature: fiction’s potential to reflect the human condition in all of its multifaceted complexity more potently than non-fiction. I believe this has a lot to do with, as Rivkin and Ryan explain in their discussion on the thoughts of idealist philosophers that “art provides access to a different kind of truth than is available to science, a truth that is immune to scientific investigation because it is accessible only through connotative language (allusion, metaphor, symbolism, etc.) and cannot be ren

dered in the direct, denotative, fact-naming language of the sciences” (3). I definitely do share the tendency of the American New Critics to assert that literature does possess unique truths that can be conveyed only through literary language.

 

Jorge Semprun Returning to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Years After the End of WWII

While I was reading this discussion, my mind was immediately jolted to a very vivid moment in Jorge Semprún’s ‘Literature or Life,’ his deeply personal account of his time in Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp in World War II. There is a retelling in the work about a conversation that several of the academics who were detained in the camp had once they were liberated; in this dialogue, they ponder how they might tell those in the outside world what had happened within the confines of the camp:

“—I imagine there will be an abundance of testimonies … Their value will be the value of the acuteness, the perspicacity of the witness … and then there will be documents… Later, historians will collect them, compile them and analyze them, and will write learned works… Everything will be said, everything will appear there … And it will all be true … But the real truth will be missing, the truth that no historical reconstruction, however accurate and all-embracing, can achieve…

The others look at him, nodding, apparently relieved to see one of us able to formulate the problems so clearly.

—Another kind of understanding, the essential truth of experience, is not transmissible … Or rather, it is only transmissible through literary writing.

He turns towards me, smiling.

—Through the artifice of the work of art, of course!” (140).

This segment underscores to me that there is an inherent quality in fiction (as opposed to documentary as specifically identified in this example) that has a very powerful potential to harness unique truths, in this case about a very particular experience in human history.

However, I also passionately believe in the Russian Formalists’ insistence on the importance of the act of defamiliarization, the action of removing objects from the automatism of perception. As explained on page 16, this is because “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and nor as they are known”. It is also because “the technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 16). The book’s examples of Tolstoy’s mastery are chilling; especially the excerpt that details the concept of private property from the point of the view of the horse. When I read the lines “Many of those, for instance, who called me their own never rode me – although others did. And so with those who fed me. Then again, the coachman, the veterinarians, and the outsiders in general treated me kindly, yet those who called me their own did not” (17), I actually get chills – and maybe if those lines were written from a human point of view, it would not hit me quite that hard – and that would be because the effect of defamiliarization would not occur. This discussion makes me think of the Dada artistic movement or of performance theatre that unexpectedly involves the audience – both artistic actions that aim to create a species of rupture with what can sometimes be a detached, passive audience. By creating this sentiment of defamiliarization, the audience can no longer be passive and they must be an active participant. In my opinion, the most important thing here is that this action in turn opens up the possibility of active critique and reflection on the part of the audience members themselves.

Perhaps it doesn’t just take one type of approach or technique; perhaps one must use all kinds of kinds in order to get closer to these “unique truths”…

Hello everyone,

My name is Gabriela (you can call me Gabby if Gabriela is too long, most people do!) Badica and I am in my second year of my Master’s degree in Hispanic Studies. I also completed my B.A. at UBC with a double major in English Literature and Spanish. I had a little bit of exposure to literary theory in some of my English Lit classes, although I never took a course on “just theory” (if that concept can even be so strictly classified or discerned). The most common format of my 300- and 400- level English classes was a combination of novels and theoretical texts (for example, reading Judith Butler in Science Fiction studies alongside different novels).

I am looking forward to this course and I really liked the discussion that we started yesterday about the integration of theory into student papers because this a concept that I have been grappling with for some time, especially since starting my Master’s degree and presenting in the Spanish seminar. Our discussion about how we often try to superimpose theory into a paper just because we think we should have it as a framework was really interesting to me because in my personal writing process, I tend to think of the theoretical texts and works of fiction the way I would if I were writing a comparative paper on two different novels; that is simply the way it comes to me. Perhaps this is because I wrote one too many comparative papers when I was doing my English Lit degree and I have come to really enjoy that type of paper, or perhaps it is because I think both the theoretical text and the work of fiction occupy the same plane when it comes to importance in a paper and I cannot envision one as more important than the other. This is a tension that is present in all of my recent papers and I greatly look forward to this class because I think it will be a challenging and safe space where I can work out that question for myself while, of course, having the support of my peers and professors as we move forward in this process together.