Practicing the Death of the Author

The following quotations from Barthe’s essay “The Death of The Author,” will serve as guides for composing a practical lesson plan.

- “who is speaking thus”
- “writing is the destruction of every voice”
- “ writing is a neutral composite space where our subject slips away”
- “an author does not exist prior to or outside of language”
- “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified”
- “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
- “ A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, contestations, but there is one place this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader not … the author.”



Experimental micro-lesson plan

Objectives
- To reinforce students’ personal interpretation of poetry. (recreating the text through the act of reading)
- To help students to free themselves from the limits imposed by the author, and to give them the chance discover new meanings rather than those intended by the author.
- To let students set out their own understanding of the characteristics of the voice in the poem of discussion depending on their reading of the text not on the author’s biography.
- To ask students to write down the inter-textuality brought to their minds by the text.

Methodology
- Students will read Ben Jonson’s “ON MY FIRST SON” in groups of four.

1 FAREWELL, thou child of my right hand, and joy,
2 My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
3 Seven years th' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
4 Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
5 O, I could lose all father now. For why
6 Will man lament the state he should envy?
7 To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
8 And, if no other misery, yet age?
9 Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
10 Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;
11 For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
12 As what he loves may never like too much.

- The poem will be presented without the name of the poet or the time of writing.
- Students will be required to discuss the following questions:
What do you thing the meaning of the poem is?
What is your personal interpretation of the first and tenth lines?
Does it remind you of any other literary text (inter-textuality)? What are the facets of similarity?
What are the characteristic of the voice in the poem.? What are the textual signs or details that made you think so?
- students should be provided with the intended meaning of the author, and should be asked to compare it to their own interpretation.

Check this interseting critique of " the death of the Author" http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibss5.html

Transcendental Signified as the Basis of Deconstruction Theory

In his defense of writing in his book Of Grammatology , Derrida introduces some concepts that later became central to the deconstruction theory. The most important of which is the transcendental signified “If reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical….” 1825. To explain the meaning of the transcendental signified with reference to the article itself as well as my previous understanding of this concept, I can say that Derrida assumes that the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the present is founded on a classic, fundamental error. This error is searching for a transcendental signified, an “ external point of reference” ( like God, religion, reason, science….) upon which one may build a concept or philosophy. This transcendental signified would provide the ultimate meaning and would be the origin of origins. This transcendental signified is centered in the process of interpretation and whatever else is decentered. To Derrida THIS IS A GREAT ERROR because
1. There is no ultimate truth or a unifying element in universe, and thus no ultimate reality (including whatever transcendental signified). What is left is only difference.
2. Any text, in the light of this fact, has almost an infinite number of possible interpretations, and there is no assumed one signified meaning.
Accordingly, whatever pre-constructed meaning of a text has to be deconstructed to examine the possible different meanings. What is centered has to be decentered and what is privileged has to be unprivileged. Rather than providing how a text means ( like new criticism methodology), or discovering how a text means ( Structuralism methodology), Deconstruction aim at showing that what a text claims saying and what it actually says are “discernibly” different.
I have to say at the end, that Derrida requires eliminating whatever transcendental signified in the process of interpretation, but, at the same time, he himself constructs a transcendental signified. Rejecting whatever value or outside referent in the process of interpretation is a referent itself and assuming that is no ultimate truth is a transcendental signified as well. It is a referent that we have to keep in mind and refer to all the time and before doing anything. Therefore, how can Derrida ask us to practice what he is not actually doing himself?

Todorov’s Structural Strategy

Structuralists seek a system of codes they believe to convey the meaning. For them what really matters is how a text convenes meaning rather than what meaning is conveyed. This is the center of the structuralists’ methodology. For example, we usually assume that white color refers to purity, innocence or peace, but a Structuralist would question what is the sign system or the code that allows readers to interpret white color as “purity’ or ‘innocence’. In short, a structuralist has to find out how language works to convey the meaning. This takes place by explaining the relations among various components of the language.
Todorov follows the same strategy; he states that the purpose of his approach “is not to articulate a paraphrase but a theory of the structure and operation of the literary discourse.” 2100.
Furthermore, when Todorov analyzes the plot of Decameron tales, he resorts to the stylistics of the text to figure out the stream of the dramatic action: he examines the minimal schema of the plot, analyzes the narrative clause, showing the verbs that refer to actions, categorizes modality…….etc.
Through these items, Todorov tries to discover how language functions to convey the meaning. This is the essence of structuralism..

Strauss’s Matrix Structural Analysis Method

In his essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Strauss’s uses the matrix structural method of analysis that is usually used to analyze complex structures of meaning. Unlike the classical method of analysis that depends on providing answers by means of analytical beam formulation [paradigmatic relations (horizontal)], the matrix method examines the interrelations between parts of meaning [Syntagmatic relations (Vertical)] on the level of sentences, or between parts of meaning and other parts (defining larger unites like context). The use of the matrix method doesn’t make things easier to grasp for those who don’t like mathematics like myself, on the contrary it might make things more difficult to understand. But, I have to admit that it tries to show the logical relations between different parts of meaning. To give an example, the grouping of events in the matrix of Oedipus myth, made it easy to me to trace the overrating and underrating of blood relations as two binaries on one hand, and the denial and persistence of the autochthonous origin of man on the other. But I wonder how a classical method would be able to analyze the meaning as intended by Strauss himself.

The Significance of Theory

The difficulty of theory, as elaborated by Eagleton, was not extensively discussed in class and I would like to shed light on that idea which I find appealing to me. Eagleton states that theory is difficult, not only because of its sophistication and discourse, but mainly because of “its demand that we return to childhood by rejecting what seems natural and refusing to be fobbed off with shifty answers from well-meaning elders.” (Eagleton 35) ‘Natural’ in the previous quotation refers to “ our routine social practices” as he explains on page 34 and since theory is “a social practice” (p 24) the first quotations implies rejecting the theory itself because they are not familiar with the social practices of the elders. I find that the major source of difficulty in Theory is that it stands alone as a subject away from literature. In other words the subject of literature “fades out” and self-reflexivity becomes more important than the subject of literature itself. The function of theory is mainly to develop a systematic sense of appreciation and understanding to literature, but when it become more important than literature itself, I prefer to be a child rejecting the practices of the elders.