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

[Ramza00]

Not true. Just choosing to share the work with us does not rob the author of the true ownership of the story or its meaning.

Yes it does. When you "publish a story" it is now a "commodity" and not truly your work that exists simultaneously in your mind and a rough draft is on paper. What you wrote literally has to stand on its own.

-----

Sigh this is such a discussion for our times and our modern times. It would be a different discussion if we were telling an oral history and so on.

[The Extinguisher]

Your suspicions are wrong. This same textbook insisted that Lord Of The Rings was a Cold War allegory, and that 1984 was a tract on banning computers.



Your image doesn't seem to work for me, but "Blue" in the context of the sky has a fairly limited meaning, and the majority of people seem to find a clear blue sky pleasant. Your point about the colors not being quite the same is valid, though - I'd find it pretty disturbing if the sky were that exact tint, although it would be much more unnatural than the simple dreary overcast that makes more sense in context.

it definitely feels exaggerated, but even assuming its not, you had one bad english course so you decided to throw out the whole discipline?


also, getting a link to an error page is very funny in this context, cause to modern reader "tuned to a dead channel" doesnt actually mean much, but pages that cannot be found certainly do and imagining an error message in the sky is a pretty bleak and vivid image

[GloatingSwine]

Your suspicions are wrong. This same textbook insisted that Lord Of The Rings was a Cold War allegory, and that 1984 was a tract on banning computers.

The problem I'm having here is that you're expecting us to trust to your memory and understanding of a textbook for a course you admit to having failed, implying that you probably didn't remember or understand it when you were actually taking the course. About which you are making improbable claims without evidence.

But be my guest, go and find your copy of this textbook and snap a couple of pics of it with your phone and post them so we can all see them.

[Gnoman]

The problem I'm having here is that you're expecting us to trust to your memory and understanding of a textbook for a course you admit to having failed, implying that you probably didn't remember or understand it when you were actually taking the course. About which you are making improbable claims without evidence.

But be my guest, go and find your copy of this textbook and snap a couple of pics of it with your phone and post them so we can all see them.

The problem I am having is that you automatically assume that I am lying because you can't possibly imagine that any such thing is possible.

I took this class 15 years ago. I sold the textbook once I was done with it. Even if I remembered the name and edition, I'm not going to spend a fortune obtaining a copy to present as evidence because you've already assumed that I am lying.


I'm done. Go ahead and keep refusing to believe me because it challenges your preconception of the truth. It doesn't matter to me either way.

[Frozen_Feet]

What the author meant to say and what they actually said are separate things though.

The text is the thing they actually said. It is the only thing that is necessary.

If that's supposed to be your reply to me, you're not a very good judge on what was "actually said".

Here: let's suppose I write a long message and then put it through an encryption algorithm. I end up with something that incidentally looks like English: "123ur.momisawhore".

By focusing on the text as what's "actually being said", without knowledge of my intent, my encryption key etc., you won't ever get what was actually said.

Now, is there a point where I can screw up before and during the encryption process, leading to the actual message being lost? Yes. It's possible for the sender, the author of a message, to screw up. But even then you need to know the encryption process, the intent etc. to gauge whether that happened.

Without those, you never get what's "actually said". You only get incidental observations and potential interpretations with no way to confirm between them.

In other fields of life, such as trying to decipher writings left by foreign or ancient cultures? The author being dead or absent is not a good thing. It is one of the biggest problems. It is conceited to think that fiction written in your own language is any different.

---

Not really. I fundementally disagree with both of these assertions.

So you fundamentally disagree on how language works. Great for you.

If I am a madman and I intend to convey the message that 'The Color Blue is Magical and if you paint yourself blue you will be able to fly and conjure money from thin air' and I write a book that turns out to be a fairly decent read on the history of oil paints and their invention. Speaking with me about my intent when writing the book will not only be utterly useless, but actively hinder your understanding of the text. Knowing the Author's intent of what they meant to say is irrelevant and entirely separate from what was actually said. If you are studying or discussing what was actually said, then what was intended to be said is not the subject and so nothing more than a red herring.

Okay, first of all, unrealistic example. Second, like GloatingSwine above, you're pretty useless in deciphering what's "actually said" if you think arbitrary strings of letters are the be-all-end-all of information conveyed. I already explained that part above, so let's deal with this gem:

So you're saying it's impossible to derive meaning from a text in which you do not share a culture with the writer? That's patently ridiculous. Millions of people don't share a culture with shakespeare, and yet still find meaning in his works. Millions of people don't share a culture with any given author and yet they can still enjoy the books.

Okay, one: who are these "millions of people"? Are you thinking of people who speak English?

If you are, then your entire argument is obtuse. Shakespeare invented and codified important parts of English vocabulary, and because English has been a living language continuously from that period to now, grammar and the writing system is still at least partially shared and thus recognizable to modern readers.

Two: are you really thinking of people who go and read Shakespeare's original scripts as they were written, or just of people who know his stories because they have been rewritten, translated and adapted to modern audiences over and over?

Because while there are potentially millions of people who can read Shakespeare's scripts, they are largely academics of English language who are not only well-versed in modern English, they've rather specifically went and acquired necessary linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand things like old English, theater, drama, etc.

You know what kind of person would actually count as someone who shares no cultural background with Shakespeare? Try a Japanese middle school student. Give them an actual script in Shakespearean English and see how well they do deciphering meaning from it. See how enjoyable they find the process.

[GloatingSwine]

The problem I am having is that you automatically assume that I am lying because you can't possibly imagine that any such thing is possible.

What's more likely, you have a poor memory and understanding of a course you failed fifteen years ago, or that you are able to accurately relate the content and meaning of a textbook from that course?

Here: let's suppose I write a long message and then put it through an encryption algorithm. I end up with something that incidentally looks like English

A tedious non-sequitur used as an excuse to write something risque and insulting, how droll.

There is no equivalence between coincidental output of an algorithm designed to conceal information by rendering it into something else and a literary text. One is a work of deliberate construction the other is not.

Your argument is invalid.

[Ramza00]

If that's supposed to be your reply to me, you're not a very good judge on what was "actually said".

Here: let's suppose I write a long message and then put it through an encryption algorithm. I end up with something that incidentally looks like English: "123ur.momisawhore".

By focusing on the text as what's "actually being said", without knowledge of my intent, my encryption key etc., you won't ever get what was actually said.

Now, is there a point where I can screw up before and during the encryption process, leading to the actual message being lost? Yes. It's possible for the sender, the author of a message, to screw up. But even then you need to know the encryption process, the intent etc. to gauge whether that happened.

Without those, you never get what's "actually said". You only get incidental observations and potential interpretations with no way to confirm between them.

In other fields of life, such as trying to decipher writings left by foreign or ancient cultures? The author being dead or absent is not a good thing. It is one of the biggest problems. It is conceited to think that fiction written in your own language is any different.

I agree with this, this is Wittgenstein Lion after all.

Spoiler: Existential Comics

Show

You should read and other comics and also read the entire tag of wittgenstein for this smart guy who probably had Aspergers greatly enlarged our understanding of language.

http://existentialcomics.com/philoso...g_Wittgenstein

Existential Comics notes / description under the comic

In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him". This seems contradictory, because of course if he is speaking, it seems like we would understand him. But for Wittgenstein, the words themselves don't so much convey meaning, but express intent that is confined within a particular situation that takes place within our shared culture and experience. So, for example, if a surgeon is performing surgery and said "nurse, scalpel", it isn't simple the two words together that convey the meaning of the surgeon wanting the nurse to hand him a scalpel, it is their shared knowledge of what a surgery is, and what is expected under those circumstances. If, for example, the nurse and surgeon are later at a company dinner, and the surgeon says "nurse, salt", in the same cadence, this will be understood to be a joke, parodying the former circumstance. Nothing about the words themselves really conveys this, but only the shared world that both the nurse and surgeon occupy. This shared world is necessary for any language to function, and learning a language is not only learning the words, but the world in which we are expected to use the worlds.

On the hand, if a lion could suddenly speak English, it wouldn't matter much, because the world that the lion exists in is so divorced from ours, that his expressions, desires, and intents could still never be communicated. The lion doesn't know what a surgery is, or a dinner party, or a joke for that matter. Likewise, we don't know what sort world the lion occupies, so words would be useless. This phenomenon isn't as outlandish as it might sound at first, and even occurs frequently among humans. For example, I had two coworkers who played World of Warcraft constantly, and would talk about it at lunch. They could speak to each other for ten minutes, in English, and I wouldn't be able to decipher a single sentence. It isn't because I didn't understand the meaning of the worlds, but because I had no ability to relate the words to a situation or world that I knew, so the meaning was lost on me. If I can't understand a conversation about a video game I haven't played, even when I've played similar games, how can I be expected to understand a conversation between lions?

But let me disagree with you a little Frozen Feet. It is not author intent that is the end all be hall. It is the common "social universe" the culture knowledge and cultural understanding that ground the work. If a author disappeared almost all works can stand on their own as long as the cultural knowledge / the social universe is similar enough. But these things over time and space and over periods like hundrends of years, or just transplant a novel into a different culture without recalibrating it and much of the meaning would be loss. So while the work does stand on its own and does not need the author to preserve the meaning, remove too many of that triforce metaphor I mentioned earlier like a social universe with a common enough understanding and much of the meaning would be lost of the work.

It is not just author intent that grounds a work but many things.

----

Now if the authors intent is so oblivious that you need an encryption key to decipher it, I question the useful of it as a work of literature. It may be useful as other things we use writting for like trade secrets, diaries, personal communication and so on, but literature is different from those things. You shouldn't need a super secret decoder ring to understand a text during the time of its creation if the goal is literature.

[Frozen_Feet]

A tedious non-sequitur used as an excuse to write something risque and insulting, how droll.

There is no equivalence between coincidental output of an algorithm designed to conceal information by rendering it into something else and a literary text. One is a work of deliberate construction the other is not.

Your argument is invalid.

Then you didn't read what I wrote.

Again: every piece of legible text is in essence an encrypted message. In order to decrypt it, you need a key made from shared language, shared culture, shared experience etc.

The mere existence of different writing systems should make this a trivial statement. The ability to match arbitrary visual symbols to specific sounds is algorithmic and is work of deliberate construction. Every single alphabet in existence is an encryption key.

[GloatingSwine]

Again: every piece of legible text is in essence an encrypted message. In order to decrypt it, you need a key made from shared language, shared culture, shared experience etc.

No.

You do not, in fact, need any shared experience or culture with the author of a text to derive meaning from it.

The meaning you derive from a text will not necessarily be the same meaning that the author concieved when writing it, but the whole point of the death of the author is that that does not make your meaning invalid. As long as you can be specific in quoting the text and showing the process by which you turned it into meaning, you can show that you have found a valid meaning.

There is no specific encrypted meaning in a text. Meaning is constructed in the mind of the reader using the text as a basis.

(Remember as well when we say "text" we're actually talking about any medium. Your point about languages and alphabets is bunk, because a "text" could be a silent movie with no intertitles, or a symphony, or a wordless game experience just as easily as it could be a written work.)

[druid91]

Okay, first of all, unrealistic example. Second, like GloatingSwine above, you're pretty useless in deciphering what's "actually said" if you think arbitrary strings of letters are the be-all-end-all of information conveyed. I already explained that part above, so let's deal with this gem:



Okay, one: who are these "millions of people"? Are you thinking of people who speak English?

If you are, then your entire argument is obtuse. Shakespeare invented and codified important parts of English vocabulary, and because English has been a living language continuously from that period to now, grammar and the writing system is still at least partially shared and thus recognizable to modern readers.

Two: are you really thinking of people who go and read Shakespeare's original scripts as they were written, or just of people who know his stories because they have been rewritten, translated and adapted to modern audiences over and over?

Because while there are potentially millions of people who can read Shakespeare's scripts, they are largely academics of English language who are not only well-versed in modern English, they've rather specifically went and acquired necessary linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand things like old English, theater, drama, etc.

You know what kind of person would actually count as someone who shares no cultural background with Shakespeare? Try a Japanese middle school student. Give them an actual script in Shakespearean English and see how well they do deciphering meaning from it. See how enjoyable they find the process.

Or indeed, this is an example of the very thing we have argued. Your intended meaning and actual meaning did not coincide.

Your pedantry about 'language' is nonsensical and frankly irrelevant.

[Lethologica]

Then you didn't read what I wrote.

Again: every piece of legible text is in essence an encrypted message. In order to decrypt it, you need a key made from shared language, shared culture, shared experience etc.

The mere existence of different writing systems should make this a trivial statement. The ability to match arbitrary visual symbols to specific sounds is algorithmic and is work of deliberate construction. Every single alphabet in existence is an encryption key.

This is a lovely analogy. However, the aims of literary decryption are a little different - reproducing the original message with maximum accuracy is not the sole, perhaps not even the primary, goal. The aim is more to generate output that is interesting (vague word alert!). Of course, the key should be somewhat like the author's, otherwise the interestingness of the output is totally arbitrary, which makes it uninteresting. But beyond that, matching the author's message is a goal only insofar as it happens to align with the primary goal.

[Grytorm]

That depends, can you quote specifically the things in the text that made you think that?

Let us say I can. And what I quote from an outside perspective has no reasonable connection to the conclusion I had made.


Despite not having posted much in this thread I already find trying to argue difficult. I have disorganized thoughts which will justly be ignored as inconherent. But the more absolutist arguments for death of the author and letting the text stand by itself I find disagreeable. But I can't directly refute them. So some more thoughts.

A text relies largely on metaphors you don't understand. The water and fire. My mud my earth. Does that interfere in any way with interpretation?

Actually that's all I got for now. Sorry for the wordiness.

[Knaight]

An assumption in just being able to ask the author what they meant is that the decision making involved is fully conscious - which is a frankly ludicrous assumption. Even ignoring the way subconscious decision making is an essential part of language use, and even ignoring the way authors in particular routinely talk about inspiration as an external source that comes to them (from talking about muses to the idea that your characters take action on their own), that's just not how language works. The language the author used is one they learned from being immersed in a culture, built into their own personal mental model of language rich in connotation, influenced by their own experiences. Their speech and writing is then informed by habits build interacting with other people, reading other writers and having your text read and responded to, so on and so forth. There's a lot of mechanisms there that translate deliberate meaning into particular words, and the author is unlikely to be thinking about them in particular when doing so. Then there's the matter of all the perceptual subtleties that go into the meaning layer.

Despite not having posted much in this thread I already find trying to argue difficult. I have disorganized thoughts which will justly be ignored as inconherent. But the more absolutist arguments for death of the author and letting the text stand by itself I find disagreeable. But I can't directly refute them. So some more thoughts.

A text relies largely on metaphors you don't understand. The water and fire. My mud my earth. Does that interfere in any way with interpretation?

This is where distinctions between death of the author and straight up New Criticism come up. New Criticism has numerous flaws, one of which is that it removes important context from the text like "when it was written" and "where it was written". Worse it tends to create culture specific metaphors from a specific culture as universal, which can produce some really bad interpretations. An obvious one is with color theory, where assuming that black is a color associated with death, funerals, etc. is going to be bad analysis for anything written in pretty big chunks of Asia at the very least, but there's plenty of other issues. For instance the cultural weight attached to certain animals can vary hugely, and knowing where something was written is going to affect how a snake gets read, especially if it's anything but a literal snake (e.g. a character named snake, or having a vision of a snake, or having a title that uses the word snake symbolically).

[DomaDoma]

So are you just upset that looking at works through the lens of our current time brings up things you dont want to think about with your favourite authors (or, given the casual dropping of marxism as a negative adjective, something a little more insidious)

Marx is brought up here, not as the guy responsible for Stalin, but as the one who most notably espoused the idea that influential men are just the visible foam on the inexorable tide of history. (Which I still don't care for, mind.)

I don't like the contemporary lens, first, because ours is particularly shallow. More fundamentally, because a book that shapes you is like a window on another world, or a painting of your own world that highlights aspects you've never considered deeply before. It's not a mirror to be held up to the TV as it plays the prime-time news.

Again, its about how the author does not control sole ownership over interpretation and meaning. They may be able to provide insight into the production of the text, which can be used to recontextualize your own interpretation, but theirs is not more correct than anyone elses. Thats the point.

My point is that it's a false dichotomy. The author can't claim sole ownership, but at the same time, not every interpretation is equally valid.

[Knaight]

I don't like the contemporary lens, first, because ours is particularly shallow. More fundamentally, because a book that shapes you is like a window on another world, or a painting of your own world that highlights aspects you've never considered deeply before. It's not a mirror to be held up to the TV as it plays the prime-time news.

"The TV as it plays the prime-time news" is a staggeringly reductive perspective on what modernity is - contemporary analysis done well is based on the deep currents of cultural functionality, on the wide range of human experience in great detail, and generally on the complexities of life. That's what great fiction generally interacts with, and analysis done well addresses that (though some works are just shallow, which complicates it).

News, meanwhile, is fleeting. It's surface information, and while it's data that can go into deeper analysis just mirroring it gives you more surface information. TV news, at its best, is an exceptionally facile and minimally analytical perspective on that surface information.

[GloatingSwine]

My point is that it's a false dichotomy. The author can't claim sole ownership, but at the same time, not every interpretation is equally valid.

Well no.

A valid interpretation has to show specific reference to the text and a logical process between the specific quoted examples and the interpreted conclusion.

But the author's opinion is not relevant to the process, only the text.

[SaintRidley]

Not true. Just choosing to share the work with us does not rob the author of the true ownership of the story or its meaning.

An author has no control over the work once it's out in the world. This has been acknowledged as far back as Chaucer.

Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye,
Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende myght to make in som comedye!
But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mymetre for defaute of tongue;
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche!

[Willie the Duck]

Death of the Author seems to be more about saying that the author isn’t the unquestioned ecclesiastical authority on the book: your professor or favorite commentator is that authority.

And now, instead, we're using this credo to bathe every work in the light of contemporary politics. After all, what other "shared cultural existence" can there possibly be? (None at all, says Foucault: nothing is ever uttered but as part of a power struggle. There's a pretty good chance that he, not Barthes, is where it all went sour.)

To take a political example that's current, but not in vogue, for illumination purposes: We don't know the author of Beowulf, but we do know he had a pretty alien and ritualistic idea of the significance of gold, and immersion in Beowulf means aligning yourself, as far as you can, with that mentality. Interpreting Beowulf in the light of what contemporary doomsayers are saying about gold would be daft.

I don't like the contemporary lens, first, because ours is particularly shallow. More fundamentally, because a book that shapes you is like a window on another world, or a painting of your own world that highlights aspects you've never considered deeply before. It's not a mirror to be held up to the TV as it plays the prime-time news.

Well, no, our contemporary lens is very much not particularly shallow, it is just as equally shallow as any other time. Pretending we live in a particularly special or notable time (good or bad) is an act of vanity in which we should not indulge.

Regardless, these statements really seem like they were designed to take the piss out of someone. That that someone or someone(s) happen to be 'your professor or favorite commentator' rather than 'the author' is immaterial. It really seems like you resent someone having an opinion on some work or another. The "isn’t the unquestioned ecclesiastical authority on the book" part in particular--do you think that there is someone who has 'won' a battle over the meaning of some work or another? Because if that's what you are worried about, don't. That's not something that can happen.

This whole thread feels bound in a sense of winners and losers, like this were some kind of competition over who is 'right' about a piece of work. Framing things in terms such as ownership or authority seem to false frame this issue in terms of a battle to be won, rather than ideas competing in the marketplace thereof.

My point is that it's a false dichotomy. The author can't claim sole ownership, but at the same time, not every interpretation is equally valid.

Well, perhaps we can disagree on that, and it will highlight the debate. :-P
But seriously, I would not have taken that as the primary point of the body of work which were your posts up to this point.
If it is the point, it's certainly true, but also so obvious as to not be particularly meaningful. Taking Fahrenheit 451 as an example again, if my take on the novel was "the actual message of Fahrenheit 451 was that cats are better than dogs" then people should reasonable not take me seriously, but so what? Does that really answer any big questions (particularly who is right in the whole 'dangers of TV and radio vs. dangers of dangers of censorship' debate)?

Death of the Author being appropriated for arguments in fandoms and casual forum discussions where it's widely misinterpreted to mean whatever you want has given it a waxy coating of self-indulgence. Which I guess it would be ironic, except it's not poetics or prose fiction, it's an essay with a formal argument - made pretty well, it convinced me - that just got reduced to a meme.

I think things like 'canon' in fiction and concepts like 'officialdom' and whether multiple versions of a piece of fiction have contributed. Online debates trying to answer whether, say, the cinematic and comic versions of a superhero story are part of the same 'universe' (or the like), have formed a framework for declaring one particular interpretation 'right.' And of course, online culture and the refocusing of tribalist instincts in general seems to try to make everything into a case of winners and losers.

[Dragonus45]

An author has no control over the work once it's out in the world. This has been acknowledged as far back as Chaucer.

And it’s been disagreed with as recently as me posting this right now and telling you that that is wrong.

[Grytorm]

I think that part of the problem with Death of the Author is in how the idea is communicated. When I find the idea strange it is not because I think that asking the author what something means is the be all end all sution to literary criticism. More of I think that understanding an author can be an important part in understanding a text.

This is where distinctions between death of the author and straight up New Criticism come up. New Criticism has numerous flaws, one of which is that it removes important context from the text like "when it was written" and "where it was written". Worse it tends to create culture specific metaphors from a specific culture as universal, which can produce some really bad interpretations. An obvious one is with color theory, where assuming that black is a color associated with death, funerals, etc. is going to be bad analysis for anything written in pretty big chunks of Asia at the very least, but there's plenty of other issues. For instance the cultural weight attached to certain animals can vary hugely, and knowing where something was written is going to affect how a snake gets read, especially if it's anything but a literal snake (e.g. a character named snake, or having a vision of a snake, or having a title that uses the word snake symbolically).

Hmm. From the impression I get off Death of the Author this seems to be the logical endpoint of interpretation. With death of the author it seems like important bits of context have already been discarded.

[SaintRidley]

And it’s been disagreed with as recently as me posting this right now and telling you that that is wrong.

Got an actual argument for how an author has control over a work and how it's understood once it's out in the world besides "No."? Because I've got numerous examples of there being no control over that by authors, many authors who acknowledge as much, and from my own perspective as someone who writes and publishes I don't even know who winds up reading me in the first place and so have no way to control how they take my words. You're going to need more than just contrarianism.

[Dragonus45]

Got an actual argument for how an author has control over a work and how it's understood once it's out in the world besides "No."? Because I've got numerous examples of there being no control over that by authors, many authors who acknowledge as much, and from my own perspective as someone who writes and publishes I don't even know who winds up reading me in the first place and so have no way to control how they take my words. You're going to need more than just contrarianism.

And your going to need more then, “because I said so”.

[Ramza00]

And your going to need more then, “because I said so”.

Why?

^{(Insert text for Giant In the Playground forums will not allow a 4 character response.)}

[Dragonus45]

Why?

^{(Insert text for Giant In the Playground forums will not allow a 4 character response.)}

Because I disagree with the base assertion and just saying that “The Death of the Author is reality because we say it is.” Isn’t actually an argument for why a creator loses the right to be the final arbiter is the intentions of their work.

[Ramza00]

Because I disagree with the base assertion and just saying that “The Death of the Author is reality because we say it is.” Isn’t actually an argument for why a creator loses the right to be the final arbiter is the intentions of their work.

But people have already explain to you that your ideal is not what happens in the "real world," your ideal may be noble but it is not practical, and no matter how you wish your ideal to be true it just does not occur.

So Death of the Author is not literally saying the Author is Dead (read the essay sometime), it is saying that when we use critical theory to say what we liked about a work and what we dislike, and all other forms of talking about a work we should not just ASSUME everyone knows the authors intent, and when there are ambiguities we can't end arguments about meaning by saying this is the author's favoritemeaning.

No death of the author the 6 page essay says the author has limited agency, limited control once his work is published. He still has agency but he no longer has primacy and the other interpretations are just as valid at being able to stand on their own with their own foundation.

Think of it this way imagine an ocean with one intents. Imagine a land, the original land like the UK and people decide to depart this original land to create new places. Once an author creates a work we have "colonies" of ideas not just 1 colony but many and the authors own intent is a separate colony from other intents like the readers who breathe their own intent in when they read the work, they themselves become co-creators. All of these lands, the original and the colonies are separated by an ocean that is so vast over time and space that the intents of people in one land can't enforce the rules onto another land.

Death of the author merely states the author's colony can't control and assert dominion about these other colonies that were created by the distance that is the ocean. We are in a New World.

-----

Now part of this new world of colonies is many interpretations are very silly and they can't really self support themselves, but criticism that has utility are colonies that are self sufficient, the ideas build onto each other and people can understand them merely by the ideas reinforcing themselves in a loop. Jamestown happens, but also Williamsburg, and Boston, and so on and so on (list over 10,000 and even more for there is an uncountable amount of times when humans make a venture and try to tame a new land.)

[Willie the Duck]

Because I disagree with the base assertion and just saying that “The Death of the Author is reality because we say it is.” Isn’t actually an argument for why a creator loses the right to be the final arbiter is the intentions of their work.

I think both sides should recognize that there is no set default. The creator hasn't lost a right, because the right has not yet (in this thread) been established in the first place. The burden of proof isn't in one specific direction in this case. Each side should make cases towards their own position. You are correct that SaintRidley has not put forth an argument towards his position (other than appeal to Troilus and Criseyde's authority), but that is the case for the counter-position as well.

[Ramza00]

I think both sides should recognize that there is no set default. The creator hasn't lost a right, because the right has not yet (in this thread) been established in the first place. The burden of proof isn't in one specific direction in this case. Each side should make cases towards their own position. You are correct that SaintRidley has not put forth an argument towards his position (other than appeal to Troilus and Criseyde's authority), but that is the case for the counter-position as well.

Nods.

^{(Insert more text for the Giant In The Playground Rules.)}

[Tyndmyr]

Your suspicions are wrong. This same textbook insisted that Lord Of The Rings was a Cold War allegory, and that 1984 was a tract on banning computers.

I suspect you had the misfortune of an unusually bad textbook, probably chosen by an unusually dogmatic professor. Most people are a bit more reasonable than this, I think, but yeah, you do get the occasional reviewer or reader who insists that their particular reading is the only possible one, and chooses a ridiculous one at that.

This isn't specifically because of the paper mentioned at the beginning, but they do tend to trot it out if the author's statement contradicts theirs.

To me, it's reasonable to accept that, sure, an author can be mistaken or crazy, but most of the time, they're not, and are a decent enough person to ask about stuff. Even if the author isn't available, considering the context of the time the work was written and who the author was will certainly help you understand what it is they were trying to convey. Completely disregarding all author statements has always struck me as a bit disrespectful to the author. I think it only ought to apply when the author is intent on going beyond reasonable clarification of ambiguity into inventing new stuff wholesale.

Your image doesn't seem to work for me, but "Blue" in the context of the sky has a fairly limited meaning, and the majority of people seem to find a clear blue sky pleasant. Your point about the colors not being quite the same is valid, though - I'd find it pretty disturbing if the sky were that exact tint, although it would be much more unnatural than the simple dreary overcast that makes more sense in context.

I would agree that the context of a blue sky is quite different, and generally less ominous, than describing it as the color of static. In this particular case, looking at what technology was familiar to the author at the time provides us with an accurate idea of what was likely intended.

Static, in particular, carries a lot of weight when one gets into the cyberpunk genre. It's not only electronic, but it's random. Noise. The world is not only electronic, but it's chaos. This is something that the interpretation of blue does not convey, and so meaning is lost.

[Dragonus45]

But people have already explain to you that your ideal is not what happens in the "real world," your ideal may be noble but it is not practical, and no matter how you wish your ideal to be true it just does not occur.

Is that why in the “real world” we constantly see people following authors twitters, blogs, and blogs? Is that why we see extensive Q&A panels for authors like Brandon Sanderson with people constantly asking them details about the world or what he meant by including various details. Because clearly none of these these people consider the authors intentions when they read the books at all.

So Death of the Author is not literally saying the Author is Dead (read the essay sometime), it is saying that when we use critical theory to say what we liked about a work and what we dislike, and all other forms of talking about a work we should not just ASSUME everyone knows the authors intent, and when there are ambiguities we can't end arguments about meaning by saying this is the author's favoritemeaning.

Thank you for assuming I hadn’t read the essay. Believe it or not, I disagree with that essay. Gasp! How dare I. You see, it’s not The Authors “favorite” meaning, it’s the correct meaning as stated by the all powerful god who created the work in question and is the ultimate authority on the piece in question.

No death of the author the 6 page essay says the author has limited agency, limited control once his work is published. He still has agency but he no longer has primacy and the other interpretations are just as valid at being able to stand on their own with their own foundation.

You keep appealing to the essay like some how reading it will blow my mind, as it will suddenly grant me the deep secrets of the universe and I will rapidly cease my ignorant refusal to agree with you. No, it’s wrong. The author poured the effort into creating the story and if they do have an interpretation, some don’t after all either because they refuse to state it or just didn’t bother thinking about it and admit as much, then in fact they do have primacy on what they created. Interpretation that goes against the authors intent is wrong.

[Ramza00]

You keep appealing to the essay like some how reading it will blow my mind, as it will suddenly grant me the deep secrets of the universe and I will rapidly cease my ignorant refusal to agree with you. No, it’s wrong. The author poured the effort into creating the story and if they do have an interpretation, some don’t after all either because they refuse to state it or just didn’t bother thinking about it and admit as much, then in fact they do have primacy on what they created. Interpretation that goes against the authors intent is wrong.

The fact that you disagree with the essay is actually a proof of the point the essay is making. The author is making an primacy point, and by disagreeing with the author you also are in fact agreeing with the meaning that what an author is saying is not the end all be all. That the reader co-ocreates with the author and the text has to survive on its own.

The fact you disagree with the essay is proof that the author does not get the final say so.

Do you not see this logical contradiction? I am confident you see it, but I also think you still want to argue it. It is literally a logical proof that proves itself by a Catch 22 situation.