The Death of the Author debate is way too blinkered in scope

[druid91]

I'm not sure I agree this is a good summary if "death of the author", but taken at face value, yeah, it' s crap.

To be blunt: any text without outside context is just a meaningless string of letters. Even the knowledge of the language that the text nominally is written in needs to come from outside the text. Asking the author for clarification is the common sense first step because that's how we'd do in every other field of communication if at all possible. Willfully ignoring a living author is just being willfully stupid.

Only if your intent is to read the author rather than the book. If you're using the book as an imperfect window into the authors thoughts on something, then yes. You should totally speak with the author. If your intent is to, instead, read the book. Then speaking with the author can only muddle the waters.

The problem is that people take knowledge of the author and use that knowledge to excuse poorly written books.

How many works function without context outside themselves? You can't understand half of Uncle Tom's Cabin without a basic grounding in Christianity (ideally one that knows the significance of Methodism in the nineteenth century). Clifford the Big Red Dog requires a working knowledge of regular proportions. Even that one wretched professor of mine who thought The Tempest was about colonialism in the Caribbean had to supply an outside context to make that point.

Nah. The wholesale silencing of the author in particular is completely arbitrary. Not to mention unnecessary. I have my personal application for the finale to Little Shop of Horrors, and it's enriched my perspective on the world. I find no damage is done by admitting that it is a personal application.

Then they were poorly written books, or poor interpretations of those books. The only thing you should require to understand a book is maybe a dictionary. That's it.