h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

we are very vigourously agreeing, Effers.

Have you read Barthes, 'Death of the Author'?

No.



But I'll bet that I should.

I've found an English translation on line and I've had a quick look at the wiki thingy about the essay and . . .


It looks like every professor I had in university agreed with Barthes. The "Intentional Fallacy" was drilled into me from the age of 17.

On the other hand, I'm very fond of source criticism, as evidenced by this very thread.


I'll have a look at Barthes after I finish The Hill of Dreams, which should be in about ten minutes.

It's a pretty short paper which was proscribed reading at Goldsmiths It makes a heck of a lot of sense though...from memory.

But it's just counter balancing the concept of the genius artist creator who could anticipate all the many ways their work could/might be consumed...and that the reader(s) reading the work *make it*, in combination with the 'artist creator'.

I like this thread

simpost.

I remember when I was in grade 11 (about 15 years old) I entered into a brief debate with my English teacher (just completing his M.A. on symbolism in the works of Hawthorne). I suggested that sometimes a poet produces a work which has meanings of which the poet himself (it was the 70s, so poets were all male) was unaware. He responded Socratically with 'do you mean there's a lack of artistic control?' to which I responded 'No . . . '

I was fifteen, after all.

In hindsight I realize he was pushing me to reason to and beyond the best of my ability, and I am very grateful to him for it. He was a truly great teacher.


The year after he taught me he quit teaching high school English and moved to the mountains to be a ski instructor.

from Barthes:

'a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.'

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm

This reminds me of a passage from Claude Levi-Strauss which has always fascinated me:

'I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the / place where something is going on, but there is no "I", no "me." Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.'

(Myth and Meaning, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 3-4.)





For me, in my field of Medieval and Classical works, the question of author has most often been moot: it's the rare work for which even an author's name survives, let alone any sort of biography. A text is dropped naked into our laps and we must read that text, for it is all we have.

'The year after he taught me he quit teaching high school English and moved to the mountains to be a ski instructor.'

I feel I must correct a rumour I've held as truth for three decades now. My teacher did not move to the mountains to simply teach skiing. He did move to the mountains, but, oh, my, he has been busy! I did some googling and it turns out that he's been constantly teaching English literature in very innovative ways both to school children and adults. I found this interesting programme he's helped develop, partly directed at new Canadians: http://eng-world.tripod.com/intro2.html

I was very fortunate to be taught by this man for a year.