Reply #57: the "death of the author" argument [View All]

[tishaLA]

You reference about intentionality is a poststructuralist one, not a postmodern one. And really, I think it's fair to believe that authors may be intending to accomplish x in their writings, but in addition to x, y also happens (even without the author knowing he or she has done it) or, conversely, that while trying to accomplish x, the author instead undermines x .

Besides which, even if we were to accept what authors say their writing is about like articles of faith, we would still have a paltry record of what we could say about literary texts. It would mean we were limited to purely formalist analyses of the vast majority of texts; that might be enjoyable on some level (I practice what is called "new formalist criticism"), but it also leaves a good deal out. It would mean the death of feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and queer criticism, among other things, all of which have given us important ways of experiencing the literary text and transforming the canon.