DOCSLIB.ORG

“No Symbols Where None Intended”

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
“No Symbols Where None Intended” 130.3 ] theories and methodologies “No Symbols Where None Intended” WHAT DOES THE AVERAGE MIDDLE SCHOOLER KNOW ABOUT CLOSE READING? joshua gang Launched in 2010 and adopted by forty- three states and the Dis- trict of Columbia,1 the Common Core State Standards read like a Well Wrought Urn for kids—a New Critical primer for a new gen- eration. From kindergarten through grade 12, close reading is the backbone of literary curricula. With each passing year, students per- form close readings of increasing complexity—and with what feels like increasing adherence to New Critical doctrine. According to the Common Core reading standards, ffh graders must be able to “determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including fgurative language such as metaphors and similes.” Tey must also be able to explain “how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fts together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem” (12). By eighth grade, students must be able to “provide an objective summary of the text” and “compare and con- trast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the difering structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style” (36). And by eleventh or twelfh grade, they must “cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain” (38). Students meeting these stan- dards, we are told, can “readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex literature” (3). In their textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which popularized close reading across North American universities, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren announced a similar goal: “to present to the student, in proper context and afer proper preparation, some of the JOSHUA GANG , an assistant professor of basic critical problems—with the aim, not of making technical crit- En glish at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on his manuscript ics, but merely of making competent readers of poetry” (xiv). “Word and Mind: Behaviorism and Liter- But the Common Core standards aren’t entirely faithful to the ary Modernity, 1913 to the Present.” His New Critics—particularly when it comes to authorial intention. In work has appeared in journals such as Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), I. A. Richards warned that ELH and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. © 2015 joshua gang PMLA 130.3 (2015), published by the Modern Language Association of America 679 “No Symbols Where None Intended” [ PMLA “whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the men- discussions of surface reading, readers have tal processes of the poet are not a very proft- been asked to think about the texts in front of able feld for investigation. Te difculty them instead of the minds behind those texts. is that nearly all speculations as to what went “Tough we would not endorse Paul de Man’s on in the artist’s mind are unverifable” (24). insistence on the ‘void that separates’ poetic This argument became infamous through intent from reality,” Stephen Best and Sharon W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “Te Marcus write in “Surface Reading: An Intro- Intentional Fallacy” (1946), which argued that duction” (2009), “we remain intrigued by his authorial mental states couldn’t be inferred observation that poetry is the ‘foreknowledge’ from literary texts—and didn’t need to be: of criticism, and that the interpreter therefore “Tere is a gross body of life, of sensory and ‘discloses poetry for what it is’ and articulates theories and methodologies mental experience, which lies behind and in ‘what was already there in full light’” (12).2 some sense causes every poem, but can never In “Close Reading and Thin Description” be and need not be known in the verbal and (2013), Heather Love makes a parallel claim: hence intellectual composition which is the literary studies, she explains, “might forge an poem” (12). But in the Common Core stan- expanded defense of reading by considering dards it is precisely this “gross body of life, of practices of exhaustive, thin description . sensory and mental experience” that students forms of analysis that describe patterns of be- must learn to incorporate into their analy- havior and visible activity but do not trafc ses. By tenth grade, students are expected to in speculation about interiority, meaning, or “analyze how an author’s choices concerning depth” (404). At the same time, recent discus- how to structure a text, order events within sions of afect have asked the degree to which it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time intentional actions are predicated on involun- (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects tary processes. In “Te Turn to Afect” (2011), as mystery, tension, or surprise.” By twelfh Ruth Leys claims that contemporary theories grade, the requirement is that students under- of afect are staunchly “anti- intentionalist”: stand how “an author’s choices . contribute they believe that “action and behavior” are to [a text’s] overall structure and meaning as “determined by afective dispositions that are well as its aesthetic impact” (38). In defance independent of consciousness and the mind’s of the New Critics of old, the Common Core control” (443). Responding to Leys, Jona- wants students and teachers to reconstruct than Flatley argues that “afects and moods the “author’s choices”—his or her decisions, may not be directly subject to intentions . voluntary actions—from the text. In efect, it but this does not mean that there is no way asks them to infer the author’s intentions—to to exert agency in relation to our afects and infer from literature the same sorts of things afective experiences, only that such agency they infer from conversation and texting. is mediated, variable, and situated” (505). In Te Common Core is deeply fawed in many this framework, intentions are only knowable ways—particularly in the idea that close read- or accessible insofar as they are mediated or ing is the only way to understand a work of lit- mitigated by affects. And these affects, in erature. On this point of the author’s choices, turn, are not necessarily knowable by or ac- however, it’s moving in the right direction. cessible to the conscious mind. But while the Common Core invokes in- Surface reading and afect theory may be tention readily, contemporary literary criti- new to literary study, but the concerns we have cism doesn’t. We’re not as dogmatic about about intention today are largely the same as it as the New Critics were. Nonetheless, those expressed by Richards and the New concerns about intention remain. In recent Critics. Te reasoning is as follows: As a reader 130.3 ] Joshua Gang I only have empirical knowledge of the texts in obstacles, as if there were any form of com- theories and methodologies front of me. Much in the way I don’t have ac- munication that didn’t struggle with other cess to other minds, I don’t have access to the minds or mediated agencies.4 As critical read- author’s intentions. At the same time, I also ers of literature, we hold ourselves to a stan- know that many of my own intentional actions dard that would paralyze understanding in are predicated on unintentional processes— most other contexts. whether physiological, cognitive, or afective. For example, a man tells you the road Terefore, even if I could access an author’s in- is closed ahead. You’re unable to confrm or tentions, I’d have no guarantee that they were deny this statement. His cadence, facial ex- fully intentional or fully realized. pressions, and body language give you no Nonetheless, my claim here is that in- sense of his state of mind. You can’t tell if he’s tention is an essential concept for literary lying or telling the truth. All you have is his study. I am not the first person to attempt utterance; you can’t infer his intentions or this argument—nor will I be the last.3 To be even be sure that the utterance was intended clear, this is not a case for strong intentional- at all. Does this mean that the category of ism: I’m not saying that we have perfect ac- intention is irrelevant here? Should you pro- cess to authorial intentions. Nor am I saying ceed as if his intentions weren’t an issue? A that authors have complete control over, or more literary example: “no symbols where knowledge of, their own works of literature. none intended,” which is the maddening fnal Instead, I’m suggesting that readers know sentence of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (1953 more about intention than they think—and [214]) and which returns us to Anscombe’s that the perceived inaccessibility or mitiga- definition of intentional actions. Why end tion of intention doesn’t make it any less cru- the novel this way? As the fnal words in the cial to language use or critical understanding. novel, it dangles Beckett’s intentions in front In her book Intention (1957), the philosopher of us—but never gives us access to them. We G. E. M. Anscombe defned intentional actions end up in a position like Watt himself, who as “the ones to which the question ‘Why?’ is looks at an abstract painting and tries to cal- given application” (24). What matters most for culate all the possible intentions the artist literary critics is not whether we answer that might have had: “he wondered what the artist question correctly (though we hope we do) but had intended to represent (Watt knew noth- whether we are permitted to ask it at all.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Rebirth of the Author: the Construction and Circulation of Authorship in English Culture Introduction to a Special Topic Section of Authorship
    The Rebirth of the Author: The Construction and Circulation of Authorship in English Culture Introduction to a Special Topic Section of Authorship ANNA ENRICHETTA SOCCIO Guest Editor: Anna Enrichetta Soccio is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti, Italy. She has published numerous contributions on nineteenth- and twentieth- century topics (W. Scott, J. Austen, C. Dickens, E. Gaskell, N. Hawthorne, G. Meredith, R. Broughton, T. Hardy, T. Morrison, P. Larkin), and has authored two monographs, one on George Meredith (2001), and one on Philip Larkin (2008). She is also the editor of Beauchamp’s Career. George Meredith: testo e contesto (2008), Letter(s): Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in Victorian Art and Literature (co-ed. M. Costantini e F. Marroni, 2009), and the EJES special issue on Housing Fiction: The House in Writing and Culture, 1950 to the Present (co-ed. J. Larson, F. Saggini, April 2012). She is a member of the editorial board of RSV, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and of the CUSVE (University Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies). Ever since the publication of the influential essays “The Death of the Author” (1968) by Roland Barthes and “What is an Author?” (1969) by Michel Foucault, which laid the foundations for the critical and theoretical work on authorship, the topic has been the object of numerous debates. Over the last forty years or so many attempts have been made to respond to Barthes’s theory and answer Foucault’s question, each underlining aspects which would testify to the fact that the idea of authorship, despite the tendency towards impersonality established throughout the twentieth century from modernist poetics to post-structuralism and narratology, has never ceased to be appealing to both critics and readers alike.
    [Show full text]
  • Author Versus Reader: Trends in Post-Structuralism” with Reference to “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes
    Lectures on Structuralism Lecture II “Author Versus Reader: Trends in Post-Structuralism” with reference to “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes Lecture by Dr. Sudesh Bhowate Head, Dept. of English Dr. Madhukarrao Wasnik PWS Arts and Commerce College, Nagpur-26 Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=author+vs+reader&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj18Ieql6ntAhVQxjg GHdCtAd4Q_AUoAXoECA8QAw&biw=1366&bih=625 A reader centered approach through the concept of ‘catharsis’ “A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in appropriate and pleasurable language…in a dramatic rather than narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish catharsis of these emotions” -Aristotle Philip Sydney quotes Horace: ‘A poem is a speaking picture with this end to teach and delight’ -Horace Sydney’s stand: Literature has as its primary aim the giving of pleasure to the reader and any moral or didactic element is necessarily subordinate to that or at least unlikely to succeed without it. Beginning of tradition of practical criticism in England Dr. Samuel Johnson ‘Entry of Author God with Romantics “... poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.“ -Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballad (1800) Abandonment of conventions of verbal decorum Wordsworth and Coleridge claims: Conventions had imposed a high degree of artificiality on poetic language, making it as different as possible from the language of ordinary everyday speech.
    [Show full text]
  • Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author Cheryl Walker Scripps College
    Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Scripps Faculty Publications and Research Scripps Faculty Scholarship 1-1-1990 Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author Cheryl Walker Scripps College Recommended Citation Walker, Cheryl. “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author.” Critical Inquiry. 16.3 (1990): 551-571. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Scripps Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scripps Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author Walker, Cheryl Critical Inquiry; Spring 1990; 16, 3; Periodicals Archive Online pg. 551 Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author Cheryl Walker In the late 1960s French theorists began to take account of the phenom­ enon we now know familiarly as "the death of the author." Writers like Michel Foucault raised startling questions about the voice or voices in a text, asking, "What difference does it make who is speaking?"' In the days of author criticism, the author was thought to be the speaker whose presence behind the text signaled his (or her, though usually his) capacity as originator. Textual interpretations often alluded to this historical personage as a genius whose subjectivity, once understood, provided a set of principles for discovering the underlying unity of a great work of literature. According to Foucault, in his essay "What Is an Author?" (1969), this authorial presence has disappeared. In the modern period the author is an effacement, an absence of the personal, who writes him- or herself out of the text through the strategies of fictive composition.
    [Show full text]
  • The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function” Proposes a Model of the Author-Function As a “Diagnostic” Tool
    The Post-Expressivist Turn: Four American Novels and the Author-Function. Mark Caldicott Department of English, University of Adelaide Submitted for the Degree of PhD in May 2005 for my Mother and Father Contents. Introduction. 1 1. From Romanticism to Poststructuralism: A Critical Account of the Author-Function. 6 - The Rise of the Expressivist Model of the Author 15 - Problematising the Model of the Expressivist Author 24 - Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels 32 - Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault 34 - The Author-Function: Towards a Workable Diagnostic 44 2. Contextualising the Author: The Bostonians. 56 - Situating James’s Narrative Viewpoint 58 - The American Literary Tradition in Relation to The Bostonians 71 - The Bostonians: A Contextual Model of the Author-Function 93 - James’s Break with the Expressivist Author 107 3. Modernism, the End of Modernity, and the Problem of Narrative Viewpoint: The Great Gatsby. 117 - The Great Gatsby and the End of the Modern Ethos 119 - Traditional Interpretations of Narrative Viewpoint in The Great Gatsby 127 - Callahan’s Reinterpretation of Narrative Viewpoint in The Great Gatsby 134 - The Great Gatsby and the Problem of Modernism 142 - The Great Gatsby and the Author-Function 177 4. Denaturalising a Modernist Poetics: V. 183 - Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil: The Problem of Viewpoint 185 - The V.-Histories and the Problem of Historical Understanding 201 - V. as a Work of Late Modernism 209 - V. as a Critique of a High Modernist Poetics 216 - The Operation of the Author-Function in V. 224 iii 5. Enunciating the Text: Democracy. 231 - The Problematic of Viewpoint in Democracy 233 - Democracy and the Question of Postmodernism 242 - The Author-Function and the Act of the Enunciation 254 - The Enunciation, Democracy, and Modernity 259 - The Bostonians to Democracy: The Post-Expressivist Turn 288 Conclusion.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death of the Author: Past and Present
    Tishreen University Journal. Arts. Sciences Series 2005 ( 2) ( 27 ) 2005 (2) ( 27 ) _ Tishreen University Journal for Studies and Scientific Research- Arts and Humanities Science Series Vol (27) No (2) 2005 The Death of the Author: Past and Present Dr. Ahmad Al-Issa * Hweida Issa ** (Accepted 25/8/2005) ABSTRACT Some people claim that the death of the author is a twentieth-century issue. They think that it was initiated for the first time by Roland Barthes in 1968 and consolidated by M. Foucault and others. The objective is to manipulate this information as a justification for establishing a radical discontinuity between Modern Literary Theory and Traditional Criticism. This assumption, however, does not stand to reason. The critical establishment has always maintained that literary ubiquity is possible only through the authorial anonymity. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T.S. Eliot demonstrates in detail that the man of letters is a mere catalyst and that impersonality is the differentia specifica of literariness. Similarly, Wimsatt and Beardsley reiterate, in “The Intentional Fallacy”, that any form of attention devoted to the author can be anything such as biography or psychology, but it can never be literary criticism. All the elements needed by the work of art are already in it. The symmetrical similarities between the traditional and the modern positions establish the fact that the death of the author is one of the continuities, past and present, in the literary institution. *Associate Professor: English Department, Faculty Of Arts, Tishreen University, Lattakia, Syria. ** Post-Graduate Student: English Department, Faculty Of Arts, University Of Tishreen, Lattakia, Syria.
    [Show full text]
  • "Death of the Author": Copyright in a Postmodern Age
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by UW Law Digital Commons (University of Washington) Washington Law Review Volume 72 Number 3 7-1-1997 The Author Effect after the "Death of the Author": Copyright in a Postmodern Age Elton Fukumoto Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Elton Fukumoto, Notes and Comments, The Author Effect after the "Death of the Author": Copyright in a Postmodern Age, 72 Wash. L. Rev. 903 (1997). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol72/iss3/6 This Notes and Comments is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Reviews and Journals at UW Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington Law Review by an authorized editor of UW Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Copyright O 1997 by Washington Law Review Association THE AUTHOR EFFECT AFTER THE "DEATH OF THE AUTHOR": COPYRIGHT IN A POSTMODERN AGE Elton Fukumoto Abstract:. Copyright law employs terms and concepts, such as "originality" and "authorship," which the Romantic movement developed. Post-structuralism and Post- modernism, influential intellectual and artistic trends, have attacked the "author" concept by undermining its philosophical foundations. But when Postmodem artists act in accordance with their anti-author beliefs, they expose themselves to liability for copyright infringement. Recent copyright cases illustrate the courts' not entirely satisfactory response to the artistic appropriation of previous works. This Comment suggests that the courts read a pastiche exception, broader than the current exception for parody, into the fair use defense for copyright infringement.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death Or the Revivals of the Author?
    ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 12, pp. 2670-2673, December 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.12.2670-2673 The Death or the Revivals of the Author? Mohebat Ahmadi English Department, Islamic Azad University, Larestan Branch, Iran Email: [email protected] Abstract—To investigate the relationship between the author and the text, and how different conceptions of that relationship present differing and opposing opinions about how readers should engage with text are the main purposes of this paper. It will be done by comparing Roland Barthes‟ article, “The Death of the Author”, and Michel Foucault‟s “What is an author?”. Foucault and Barthes look at the development of the idea of author and show how it has changed throughout the centuries to go with each period‟s ideologies. Barthes argues that when the author writes the text, his voice is no more dominant in it. As soon as the writer starts writing, he is dead because when he writes he has no control over the text but it depends on the interpretation of readers. Foucault stops talking about the author and starts talking about the „author function‟. An author‟s function is based on the narrations that are narrated from him. The name of author indicates a discourse of a special period or it is the symbol of that discourse‟s signs. What becomes clear is that Foucault sees the author- function as one which reveals the coincidence of a complex web of discursive practices. Index Terms—author, reader, discourse, signification, ideology, text I.
    [Show full text]
  • 16 the Author in Literary Theory and Theories of Literature Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
    16 The author in literary theory and theories of literature Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen We have become accustomed to regarding the question of the author in literary criticism and theory in anti-authorial terms. It is a quaintness of modern literary theory that the author, whom we would, commonsensically, expect to be the central agent in the production of the literary work, has, for the most part of the past century, been considered a liminal character of minor importance to literary criticism, and, if not completely dead, then at least a ghost haunting the limits of the literary work of art. The turn away from the author in literary criticism to the literary text itself was, in the first half of the twentieth century, a way to lend credibility and objectivity to the burgeoning professionalization of literary criticism and a way to distance “modern” literary criticism from the connoisseurship and biographical positivism that had dominated the critical appreciation of literature in the nineteenth century. The discourse of “the death of the author,” associated with Roland Barthes and his famous 1967 essay with that title, has been widely accepted by shifting theoretical currents and in pedagogical practices, as “reading the last rites over the corpse of the idea of the author.”1 However, apart from the fact that repeated anti-authorial pronouncements have had the ironic effect of keeping the question of the author at the center of shifting theoretical debates, the ghostly figure of the author already haunted author-critics in the late nineteenth century. In France, the dominant mode of criticism became associated with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, the contention that the literary work of art gives access to the values of the author.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death of the AI Author*
    DRAFT (25-03-19) DEATH OF THE AI AUTHOR Craig & Kerr The Death of the AI Author* Carys Craig† and Ian Kerr‡ INTRODUCTION The fantasy of creating artifacts that can themselves create is both old and new. In ancient times, Aristotle envisaged new instruments of production that would, of their own accord, compose and perform music, and weave new textiles.1 Towards the end of the previous millennium, science fiction writers imagined machines that would replace the proverbial million monkeys at typewriters—artificial intelligence (AI) that could not only reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare and all the books in the British Museum, but could also author the uncollected works2 of the future—in one instance, with a view to cornering the market on fiction.3 Today’s AI often seems stranger than fiction (if not, perhaps, stranger than some of the fiction that AI has recently generated.) By way of example, Sunspring,4 a 2016 science fiction film written entirely by an AI, tells the tale of three people caught in a love triangle on a space station. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network that generated the screenplay (subsequently naming itself “Benjamin”) was trained on a data set of dozens of * This is an early draft submitted to We Robot 2019, Miami. Please contact us before citing. We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Research Chairs program for their generous support. Special thanks also to Meghan Sali, Robin McLachlen, and Liz Gray for the outstanding research assistance that they so regularly and reliably provide.
    [Show full text]
  • Barthes Death.Pdf
    Notice warning concerning copyright restrictions The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be ``used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.'' If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of ``fair use,'' that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. ROlAND BARTHES The Rustle of Language Translated by Richard Howard dol HILL AND WANG • NEW YORK A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux Translation copyright © 1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Originally published in French as Le bruissement de la langue Copyright © 1984 by Editions du Seuil All rights reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto Printed in the United States of America Designed by Jack Harrison Second printing, I986 "To Write: An Intransitive Verb?" first published [in English] in The Lan­ guages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Richard Macksey, © 1970 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. "The Rustle of Language" first published in Vers une esthetique sans entraves, © 1975 by U.G.E. "Rhetorical Analysis" first published in Litterature et Societe, © 1967 by L'Institut de sociologie de I'Universite libre de Bruxelles.
    [Show full text]
  • Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Attitude of Roland Barthes As Expressed in His S/Z and the Death of the Author
    Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal Vol.9.Issue 2. 2021 Impact Factor 6.8992 (ICI) http://www.rjelal.com; (April-June) Email:[email protected]; ISSN:2395-2636 (P); 2321-3108(O) RESEARCH ARTICLE STRUCTURALIST AND POST-STRUCTURALIST ATTITUDE OF ROLAND BARTHES AS EXPRESSED IN HIS S/Z AND THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR FARUQ AHMED Lecturer in English, Krishnakanta Handiqui Junior College, Pathsala, Bajali (Assam) Email: [email protected] Abstract Roland Barthes' standpoint in the field of literary theory is one of the most discussed issues among the students and teachers of English literature and other related branches of study. He may be seen both as a structuralist and a post-structuralist. The basis of my discussion in this article are two famous works of Barthes – S/Z (1970) and The Death of the Author (1967). Though The Death of the Author was published a little prior to S/Z, the thoughts and ideas expressed in these two works are somehow contradictory if we see Barthes as a literary theorist. In The Death of FARUQ AHMED the Author Barthes denies the importance of the author on the way to understand a text, while in S/Z he focuses on a ‘code based’ structure for the same purpose. This Article Received: 29/04/2021 Article Accepted: 06/06/2021 difference may be because of the time, which was a period of transition from Published online:11/06/2021 structuralism to post-structuralism. So, these two works of Barthes can be regarded DOI: 10.33329/rjelal.9.2.187 as important documents as far as Barthes’ theoretical ideas are concerned.
    [Show full text]
  • Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Confronts the Death of the Author Justin Philip Mayerchak Florida International University, [email protected]
    Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 4-1-2016 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Confronts the Death of the Author Justin Philip Mayerchak Florida International University, [email protected] DOI: 10.25148/etd.FIDC000283 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Mayerchak, Justin Philip, "Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Confronts the Death of the Author" (2016). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2440. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2440 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida KURT VONNEGUT JR. CONFRONTS THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS in ENGLISH by Justin Philip Mayerchak 2016 To: Dean Michael R. Heithaus College of Arts, Sciences and Education This thesis, written by Justin Philip Mayerchak, and entitled Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Confronts the Death of the Author, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgment. We have read this thesis and recommend that it be approved. _______________________________________ Bruce Harvey _______________________________________ Ana Lusczynka _______________________________________ Nathaniel Cadle, Major Professor Date of Defense: April 1, 2016 The thesis of Justin Philip Mayerchak is approved. _______________________________________ Dean Michael R. Heithaus College of Arts, Sciences and Education _______________________________________ Andrés G.
    [Show full text]