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tags:authorwriting What is an Author - Foucault
Thought
Is the author of a message dead?
Barthes’ essay argues against traditional literary criticism’s practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the “ultimate meaning” of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader’s interpretation of the work over any “definitive” meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.
To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text. Meaning is generated by the reader interacting with the text.
comment:
With the author dead, we are left with the prospect of an endless proliferation of meaning - a thing that is in fact truly frightening.
Mallarme, it is language which speaks.
Surrealist automatic writing
surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be “played with”; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist “jolt”), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author
the true locus of writing is reading
Thought
A machine, simply a metal hand, that writes English on this scroll of paper it is fed. It does this in a sealed dark room. No one ever reads a single line.
The ink that is uses is the finest dust, lost as it is written. The paper ancient and cracked.