Organizers and Anchors

Reading Foucault was like a breath of fresh air in terms of discussion about "the author." I feel as though he outlined the role of the author in a much more realistic way that the previous critics we have read. Perhaps this is simply because he actually acknowledges the author as opposed to trying to "kill" him. The depiction of the author as both an organizer and an anchor seems to b very accurate and astute.

The author most definitely affords organization. It seems to be one of the most basic ways through which we can group texts. In the introduction to Foucault there was a comment that stating " we ascribe a certain unity and coherence to all the works written by a single author, or at least we feel that an author's drastic changes in style or opinion must be explained" (1616-17). I feel that this is extremely true today. I think that the author is slowly evolving into something of tantamount importance to the work itself. for example, in the case of the Harry Potter books, there is an enormous obsession with the author J.K. Rowling. On a more generic level, when fans today become obsessed with a certain series, or a certain group of books by one author, the next logical step seems to be book signings or fan web pages, or even blogs. Many authors now have their very own blogs to keep fans updated on their work and their lives. And fans eat it up. The author has become a marketing tool. It follows then that when fans become enamored with a certain work, or group of works by one author that they would look into others by the same author.

However, the part of the quote that discusses "drastic changes in style or opinion that need to be explained" rings even more true. There are entire web pages devoted to author bashing resulting from a change in style or opinion. And this is where foucault's observations become problematic. When the author is seen as both an organizer and an anchor it can also be stifling. The author has little to no room to change their ideas, content, genre, opinions, style etc. when they have developed a decent fan base. They are expected to produce work like what came before and if they fail to do so they are seen as deviant in some way.

In terms of an author's role in the critical world, these observations are very correct, but they provide yet another problem in the author dilemma. Any situation that limits or hinders the creative liscense of the author should be seen in a negative light...

Todorov

I remember thinking when reading Todorov for the first time that his ideas seemed like common knowledge. for example, the "action of the narrative" in which the plot moves from an "equilibrium to disequilibrium and concludes in a new equilibrium" seems to be something that even a high schooler would know (2098). However, this all seems to make sense when it is looked at with the understanding that Todorov's writings were "foundational." It makes me wonder if Todorov completely set the stage for this kind of thinking. If that is the case, than structuralism, however displaced it may seem, must have been very influential to current literary thought.

Despite the influence of structuralism, I still seem to be at odds with the whole thought process behind it. I am so used to thinking of literature and science as two very separate and distinct fields. It is very difficult to try and apply scientific thinking to the literary world. I think I struggle the most with trying to understand why you would want to make the study of literature more scientific in nature. The only conclusion I have come to is that it could be done with hopes of making literary study more respected. for whatever reason, science is a very respected field. This probably has something to do with its concreteness. There are facts in science and this allows for validity. Literature on the other hand, affords no such concrete facts. There is only theory, questions, conjectures. Science seems to be viewed as a more necessary field while literature is seemingly auxiliary and superfluous.

So why not make literature more scientific? It seems to make perfect sense. I still don't agree though. And perhaps my view of literature is too romantic for many people's tastes, but I do not think that is should be molded into something that it is clearly not. Todorov repeatedly uses language such as "theoretical" "external" "internal"and "descriptive" (2001). I just don't understand how this terminology even relates to the study of literature. Or why it has to.

If my understanding of Todorov is correct, then he is attempting to limit the subjectivity of literary study. Yes, subjectivity can be viewed as a negative thing, however, in the case of literature it can also add richness and meaning to a text. Different reader interpretations are what make a text a living thing, as Todorov calls it when he quotes Henry James.

In short, there is something singular about literature. It stands on its own and should not be molded to fit into something it was not made for. It seems almost demeaning to have to make literary study something it is not.

The Death of the Author

"The Death of the Author" sounds so terribly ominous. While I strongly disagree with the argument that the work should be evaluated only after complete separation with the writer, I cannot help but empathize with Barthe's argument in his essay. I suppose that in ordinary culture we do, in fact, view the author as superior to the reader in a way. Barthes is making the argument that reading and the reader should be superior and primary thing when looking at literature. I am somewhere on the middle of this issue, but that is not the point I am hoping to make in this blog.

I am slightly confused by the author/reader tension. Maybe the argument is beyond me, but I am just not sure why there needs to be a superior or primary thing in literature. It could be idealistic on my part, but literature seems to be made up of so many elements, all working together to create a cohesive, beautiful and working whole. Both the reader and the writer are necessary for a work of literature to achieve it's purpose. Without the author, and the author's intent there could be no work and no meaning. Without the reader there is no interpretation or reception of the work. The reader makes the work realized, because without him/her it doesn't matter that anything is published. A book could be written and sit on a coffee table and come to nothing if it isn't read. I suppose this leads to yet another philosophical question about reading though. If a book is written by an author and sits unread, does it still have worth and meaning?

I have no idea. To say that a work means nothing without a reader though, is also saying that the author then is responsible for the construction of all meaning. So if this question were posited to Barthes would he say that since the reader and reading should be the superior and primary thing that a book must be read to have any meaning or purpose?

Barthe's also seemed to imply that every act of reading was an act of writing or rewriting. Does this then make us all writers if we are all readers? How then is any distinction to be made between the actual writer, or rather the scribe in this case, and the reader-writer?

I feel as though more questions surface as a result of Barthe's essay than answers. It would most certainly make for a good debate...

The Displacement of Structuralism

Unfortunately, I am one of the few who has had trouble keeping up with their blog. My posts have been few and far between, but I am going to make a valiant attempt to remedy this today. Sorry that most of my posts will pertain to past information. I just have quite a bit of catching up to do.

I remember reading in the biography of Tzvetan Todorov that his branch of Literary Criticism, structuralism, had been "less discredited than displaced, supplanted by more socially engaged approaches--among them, Marxism, feminism, the new historicism, and cultural studies" (2098).

This doesn't surprise me at all when looking at the differences between the different literary schools. Structuralism, while a legitimate critical school, focuses so little on the author and so much on the theoretical that it cannot help but be displaced by other schools. Marxism, feminism, the New Historicism and cultural studies all allow the critic to look at the author, the culture, the background, the history. In other words, a critic is given such a wider lens through which to view a work. When one is limited to the overall system of which the work is a part, it almost seems simultaneously too broad and too narrow. What exactly is the whole system of which the work is a part? How do we find and define such a system?

On the other hand, when looking at a work through a cultural, economic, or historical lens it is easier to understand what to look for and now to go about looking for it. The scope then, is much narrower, but the amount of places in a work that a critic has to look for their topic of study is broad and rich.

I personally also think that in order to be a structuralist, especially in this post-modern era, a conscious effort must be made. Sometimes, in order to separate a work from its author and its historical background great pains must be taken. It would take a great deal of effort, that almost seems counter intuitive to make literature yield a scientific knowledge. It almost seems like an attempt to make literature something that it is not.

Perhaps it does not matter that e=mc^2 was posited by Einstein, but in the literary world, I cannot help but think that the author of a work is of paramount importance. It gives a scholar no more information about the equation to know who wrote it, but it cannot be denied that knowledge of an author adds some richness to a text.

Perhaps none of this makes much sense, but I am merely trying to say that structuralism seems a more restrictive field of study when compared to the literary schools that have replaced it. I doubt that very many of us would sit down in class and begin discussing a work from the vantage point of a structuralist. In fact, I think it would prove very difficult for most of us. To separate a piece from an author and a history would be painstaking for most of us today, as we have been raised in a literary tradition where it is desired for reader and author to connect and make meaning from the fusion of the two.

randomly today I decided to look up the definition of poetry and this is what I came up with...

"Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define."

So if poetry is meant to evoke an emotional response and it is expressed through meaning, how can the affective fallacy be true? It seems to undermine poetry's very definition.

Last Post Continued...

An interesting point brought up in the New York Times article had to do with the intentional fallacy. While some of us tend to see it in a bad light today, many scholars of the 1950s saw it as a "license to interpret." Seeing it in the light makes it much more friendly sounding to me. I had a view of the intentional fallacy of robbing the poem and poet of something. I saw the author as an important part of the poetic puzzle. But isn't it true that removing the author altogether gives so much more room for interpretation? If an author comes right out and says what his poem means in no uncertain terms then there is little to no room to interpret anything. However, this made me wonder where the line between the affective fallacy and interpretation is drawn. If the reader's response to the poem is not supposed to matter then why does his interpretation matter at all? I feel like in this instance, the intentional and affective fallacies have backed themselves into a corner. Getting rid of the author allows the reader more freedom, but the reader shouldn't matter either. So then, what does actually matter.

I keep getting a visual of a poem in the page of a book untouched by human hands. Simply sitting there, meaningless, but just "being." What good is a poem in an unopened book. Humanity is what makes poetry worthwhile. Be it the author or the reader. Without human minds the poem is simply a lot of words and a waste of space.

I don't know why this is so hard for me to simply accept. I just think that there must be meaning, or poetry is pointless. It almost seems like we are proving the arguments the ppl make against English majors. "Why do you study poetry? It's so boring. And what does all the fancy language mean anyway?" I can't imagine answering these questions with "oh well, the reader doesn't matter and neither does the author. it's all about the poem itself. " Imagining this in my mind is hilarious, and this could be attributed to the fact that it is 1 am, but our field of study is obscure enough as is. This could only make matters worse.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DF1731F93AA35755C0A960948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

After the discussion in our last class, I was left with more questions than answers regarding the intentional and affective fallacies. These questions had more to do with my own personal misunderstanding on the subject than anything else. So, because of this confusion I decided to look a little further into these two literary ideas set forth by Wimsatt and Beardsley.

I found an interesting article in The New York Times entitled "The Critics Notebook: The Four Deadly Fallacies, Pathetic and Otherwise." (See Link) To my surprise and delight (please note heavy sarcasm here, simply because it was just another thing to possibly confuse me) there are two other fallacies that I had yet to wrap my mind around. The first, is the "Pathetic Fallacy" and while it may sound self-explanatory it most definitely is not. From the information I gleaned in the article, I understand the Pathetic fallacy to be a term coined by Joh n Ruskin. It is a phrase that he coined "for the tendency of writers unconvincingly to attribute sympathetic human qualities to inanimate forces in nature.'' The example provided in the article was the description of water as 'cruel' or 'kind' depending upon the mood of the character. The toehr fallacy that was introduced in this article was that of "the fallacy of imitative form." According to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the author of the article, 30 years ago these four fallacies were weapons wielded by english majors everywhere.

To be continued...

The Intentional Fallacy

After learning about the intentional fallacy in a number of my English classes, I am no closer to fully understanding it. I understand what it is, what the poet intended is what the poem means, but I cannot wrap my mind around what that means for poetry as a whole. I think that it is absolutely legitimate to look at author intentions in order to gain insight into a poem. After all, they are the writer and creator of the work. This is not to say that I do not think that good poetry can and should stand on its own. On the contrary, I believe that the best of poetry does stand on its own. However, I think that by ignoring author intent we are laying waste to a great deal of information. I think it is important to look into author intent, but I do not feel that this should be the only information that allows readers some insight.

The most applicable example I can think to use is that of "We Wear the Mask." When looking at this poem without any knowledge of the author, his intent or background it can mean any number of things. I am sure when we participated in the class free write that everyone came up with differing beliefs about the information contained in the poem. It meant different things to all of us. When we were told about the author, it did change the way some people viewed the poem, but others continued to see the poem as a separate entity.

I personally like to think as the poem and poet as two ultimately separate things, but there is no reason to think that they cannot ever overlap. Looking at a poem only through the lens of author intent definitely cheapens it, because it then loses its many facets of meaning. In some cases the poem become less applicable and more distant to the reader. To look at "We Wear the Mask" as a poem written about African American history and slavery is fine, but it does close a lot of doors for many of the readers. In our class alone, if we were to look at the poem through this lens, the majority of us would lose our sense of relatedness to it, and our understanding as it was in our free writes would dissipate. Instead of harping on author intent as the end all and be all of a poem's meaning, I think it is better to look at poetic meaning like the layers of an onion.
One layer of meaning that cannot be ignored is that of the author's purpose. However, underneath this layer there are countless interpretations and meanings that the same poem has evoked. There should be a balance between our understanding of the poem through the "eyes" of the author, and our understanding of the poem as a separate entity. The only problem that I can find with this, is that for some it will be difficult to know about the author and restrain oneself from applying this knowledge to the poem.

I am not sure if any of this is making sense, or coming out the way I had hoped, but I simply mean to say that the meaning of good poems come from a number of sources, and one of theses sources is the author. Author intent should be tantamount to all other layers and sources of meaning.

A Confessional Smackdown

Every time I sit down to read Eliot's critical essays the confessional school of poetry comes to my mind. Everything that Eliot says about the "extinction of personality" goes against the almost painfully personal confessional poems written by Plath, Lowell, Sexton, Olds etc. The poems written by these authors are composed solely of personal experience, and the author is the intentional focal point.

So if we are to to take Eliot's assertions about poetry to be true, then it stands to reason that the confessionals can't be skilled poets. In fact, it can almost be inferred that they are not poets at all, based on Eliot's criteria.

I also think that there is a disconnect between Eliot's essay and criticism of confessional poetry. If "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry" then how is one expected to judge confessional works. The poem and the poet are inextricably intertwined. There is no way to look at such a poem objectively. To critique a confessional poem is to critique a person and their feelings and emotions. This can prove to be a problem for both the critic and the writer. Eliot calls for "continuous self-sacrifice" and this is most definitely not something found in Confessional poems. At least not in the sense that Eliot is using it. Confessionals seem to sacrifice another part of themselves, to shamelessly put their hearts on paper.

In a sense, I believe that Eliot is correct. Honest criticism really needs to look at the poem itself, however I also think that this will not always work. Confessional poems, though infused with emotion, are still skillfully written.

"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates" (Eliot 1095). This is probably the one statement in Eliot's entire essay that completely and utterly undermines confessional poetry. In this case the mind that suffers is the mind which creates. I am currently stuck wondering if one type of poetry is better than another, or if both can simply coexist and be judged using different criteria. Though, I still run into the stumbling block of how to critique confessional poetry without making any statements about the author themselves.

The Nature of Friendship

THE TABLES TURNED
AN EVENING SCENE ON THE SAME SUBJECT

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet, 10
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 20

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves; 30
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

I was leafing through my romanticism book the other day, hoping to find some clues about the stance that Emerson's friends took on the subject of books and reading. I came across this poem by Wordsworth, and found it extremely relevant. Though the poem is short, it essentially argues one of Emerson's main points. "First in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature" (2). According to both men, nature and not books should be the driving force behind the creativity of man.

I also found the line "we murder to dissect" very interesting. This is consonant with Emerson's ideas in "the poet" about poetry being a record of failure. We will always fall short of true representation. Emerson was surely not alone in his ideas about books and poetry. In fact, it seems he was in very good company and that his friends shared similar beliefs. It is very interesting though, that two such skillful writers are so willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their craft...