Wimsatt and Beardsely have a fascinating point about the relationship of the author to the text: "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, and object of public knowledge" (812). Copyright law aside, this statement is quite radical: works of literature belong to – me? You? People who’ve never read them and may not care?
I am not sure that texts can be so detached from their authors as Wimsatt and Beardsley would have it. The reputation of the authors of certain works certainly shapes out analyses and interpretations. Wimsatt and Beardsley write, "The evaluation of a work remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author" (814). Consider Shakespearean plays. Today, people who see these plays expect greatness, because culturally we revere Shakespeare’s writing. This is not merely an issue for the casual reader/watcher of the plays, but also for the critic. Often, English classes (both high school and college) take the “You should read great literature! Here is some great literature to read! Do not challenge its greatness!” approach to teaching literature. (I have serious pedagogical issues with this approach, however, that will have to wait for another post...) Thus, our analysis as students begins with the idea that “great” literature is tied to certain writers, and thus we have trouble evaluating or measuring the work outside of the author. Perhaps, we have trouble evaluating or measuring the work at all: what high school student really feels as though they are a powerful agent or critic when, after an enthusiastic and well-meaning English teacher has waxed poetic about Dickens’ genius, he/she is faced with writing an essay on David Copperfield? Being told over and over that certain authors are “great” and seeing this reinforced through culture seriously shapes our interactions with their texts. As we grow as students, and as thinkers and critics, we can become less intimidated and ready to take on the literature, but it is still difficult – if not impossible – to completely separate literature and authorship.
It seems to me that this becomes an issue of agency: to be a critic is to have power in a discourse situation. To view texts apart from their authors, as separate and as open to analysis, interpretation, and criticism, cannot simply be decreed. To interpret using the “intentional fallacy” might seem safe. In that way, a person isn’t necessarily adding new stuff to the discourse, rather, a person is appealing to a “higher” authority: the author. To be able to separate the author and the work for productive analysis – to accept and practice that idea that literature is publicly owned – requires significant maturity and confidence as a writer.
Well put.
ReplyDeleteThere is a stigma of opposition attached to almost any field of study one could choose. In psychiatry, the big names are Freud, James, Jung and Reich, and to challenge their views would be to challenge more than a century of complex and technical work and study into the human psyche. In (contemporary) music and art, minimalism reigns supreme, and to compose a work in a different style is to run the risk of being called antique or simply insane.
The problem with this approach towards study, whatever the field may be, is that we begin our studies from a one-sided or just plain biased standpoint. However, the difficulty with being objective from the get-go is that, at the start, we are so uneducated in the topic in question that without a reference point, we are aimless and completely without an intellectual compass.
I have been fortunate in that I have been taught by professors who are at least somewhat objective. Instead of having "waxed poetic", as you aptly stated, they have collectively taught in a centrist manner. No one would argue that Shakespeare was a great writer, but even if this is never explicitly or even obliquely stated by a professor, the fact that his name continually arises in studies of literature is a clear and objective indication of his influence on the collective psyche of the English-speaking culture.
It is always ok to express joy, though, in certain writers or texts. In fact, that's what I hope teachers do! I just have issues when people who, though they mean very well, convince students that certain literature is on a pedestal and cannot be touched (or analyzed) but with gloves, and that the author is some kind of literary god.
ReplyDeleteAnd, I should add, that saying authors are "great" is not necessarily a bad thing. I am not arguing for value here, I am instead stating that this particular cultural practice shapes our interactions with texts. That is, we approach texts differently, and separation of author and text is difficult, because we tend to revere various authors and kinds of literature.
ReplyDeleteOk. Now I really am done!
Your statement, "Being told over and over that certain authors are “great” and seeing this reinforced through culture seriously shapes our interactions with their texts" coincides directly with my questions about how a lot of us were educated in high school and college level english classes. It's discomforting to think back on the material we were "forced" to read growing up, wondering if we didn't have to read these "classic books" if our take on literature would be any different. I say that yes, the predetermined stature some teachers connect to certain authors not only changes one's reception of the text, but also affects how it is read.
ReplyDeleteThe entire theme of your post reminded me of our reading of Barthes' 'Death of the Author' at the beginning of the semester. In the essay, Barthes offers this belief: "The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author "confiding" in us" (875). This changes the separation of author and work completely from what Wimsatt and Beardsely refer to as literature becoming an "object of public knowledge." This is instead the presence of not the author, but a voice in which resonates the origin of the work.
The authors of our prescribed curricula are mostly influential, and by setting us to study and learn these works I am sure our educational institutions intend to engender a well structured foundation for literature. These works such as Great Gatsby or any Shakespeare play are well known and in that sense "easy" for teachers to find common themes to teach by. With these "classics" so deeply rooted in our education, we are able to understand and reference them in a split second. Although I completely agree with this unfair "pedestal" of authors I must say that they are there for a reason, and what we learn from those texts allows us to analyze and add even more literature to our mental library.
I agree with the relation of Wimsatt's and Beardsley's idea that the poem is "not the author's" to our previous reading of Barthes and even to Bahktin's ideas about novels as "social constructs". Their explanation of the "birth" of a poem really coincides with Barthe's notions that "the birth of a works is simultaneous with the death of the author" (paraphrased) and "every text is eternally written here and now".
ReplyDeleteHow can we critique a work if we remain conflated with unknown author intentions and even the looming presence of an "author" itself? Wimsatt's and Berkely's ideas about "intentional fallacy" are very formalist ones, imposing that we critique the work not in terms of the author who wrote, but rather in terms of the text alone, without an author. To critic in a way that isn't completely erroneous (in the sense that we never really can know the author's intentions, so it's useless to try to) we must only study what the text does. In this way we must look at each text as author-less (something Barthes would have eagerly agreed with). We must consider the author "dead" in our critical practice, because, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley, by the time the work reaches us it is far beyond the author's "power to inetend about it or control it" (812). The birth and release of a written work is the author's own separating process, he forever removes himself from the work and its meaning.
This also intersects Bahktin's ideas of language and literature as "social constructs. The work isn't a product of the author, but rather a product of the public. This is because language is a product of the public or a "peculiar possession of the public" (812). We as a society shape the way words are used and thus shape the meaning within literary works. In this way we create the value or intentions of a work. We determine what it means, because, in a way, we created the means by which it expresses. Language is a "social phenomenon", and no author can take credit for using this phenomenon as an expressive medium.
I really enjoy how the essays we read are beginning to interweave similar concepts.