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Postmodern Theories on Author

Postmodern Theories on Author. Some Preliminary Ideas & Overview. Outline. General Issues Post-Structuralist Theorists (textuality vs. originality) Roland Barthes Michel Foucault Derrida Metafictionists The Death and Return of the Author , How? Feminists ? . General Issues. Author

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Postmodern Theories on Author

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  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 one’s 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 Lieutenant’s Woman, John Barth’s 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 one’s 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

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