Postmodern Theories on Author

1
Postmodern Theories on Author

• Some Preliminary Ideas Overview

2
Outline

• General Issues
• Post-Structuralist Theorists (textuality vs.
  originality)
• Roland Barthes
• Michel Foucault
• Derrida
• Metafictionists
• The Death and Return of the Author, How?
• Feminists?

3
General Issues

• Author
• Creativity and originality? ? Nothing is created
  out of nothing.
• Author-ity (author-god) (omnipresence,
  omniscience)
• Relations with readers
• Authorship (of a text, of ones life, of history)
  and Subjectivity
• Text
• Definitions of work, text, discourse, ecriture
• Death or inscription of the author, the
  multiple I
• Textual frames and boundaries

4
Background

• New Criticism and Formalism objective
  correlatives or objective meanings
• Structuralism langue, structure
• Poststructuralism textuality

5
Roland Barthes

• Work Text differences in terms of method
  (product/process), genres(limit/breaking), signs
  (closure/infinite deferment), plurality
  (final/passage and intertextual), filiation
  (organism/network), reading/play
  (consumption/text plays, play the text as if it
  were a musical score), pleasure
  (pleasure/jouissance).
• Author Reader

6
Roland Barthes (2)

• The Pleasure of the Text
• As institution, the author is dead his civic
  status, his biographical person have disappeared
  . . . But in the text, in a way, I desire the
  author I need his figure . . .as he needs mine.
  . . (qtd Burke 29)
• Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
• Barthes (who will eat a plum, take a piss)
• R.B., he, I.

7
Michel Foucault What is an Author?

• Two parts of his article
• 1. What does it matter who is speaking? to
  the concluding answer that it does not matter
  also introduction of the contemporary denial of
  author
• 2. Re-definition of author as author function and
  discursive founders.

8
Metafictionists

• "If you are a novelist of a certain type of
  temperament, then what you really want to do is
  re-invent the world... God wasn't too bad a
  novelist, except he was a Realist...
• Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness. 
  ("Title," Lost in the Funhouse, p. 110.) 
• E.g. The French Lieutenants Woman, John Barths
  novels, Slaughterhouse-V ( other novels by
  Vonnegut), Stuntman, Icicle Thief, etc.

9
Death and Return of the Author, How?

• Expansion of the definition of author to
  include readers and critics. . . .the secondary
  becomes primary, the supplement is at the origin
  criticism finds itself within literature (Burke
  160)
• More specific theories on authorship are needed.

10
Feminists?

• Feminist Künstlerinroman
• constructing an artist subjectivity by writing
  ones self into a re-visioned history
  (problematic inscription of authorial selves into
  a re-written history)
• e.g. theories of postmodern historiography,
  feminist autobiography, etc.

11
Reference

• Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author
  Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault
  and Derrida. Edinburgh UP, 1998