appeals to authorial intention defended?
…I have never understood how statements about what is valid or invalid in literary criticism can support themselves. To say that something is valid is to invoke a legal system or a set of rules, as in a game, which there is an agreed obligation to obey. But in the case of literary criticism, what is this system? Who made the rules? The readily observable reality is that critics are free to proceed as they choose, using or not using biographical material as seems to them fit, speculating or not speculating about the intention of the author. The claim that to do so is not valid can have no weight, since it can point to no accepted criteria of validity. It seems, indeed, not a statement but a wish or preference – the wish to denigrate biographical criticism as improper.
- John Carey, “Is the Author Dead? Or, the Mermaids and the Robot,” Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, eds. Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006: 43-54).
Hmmm…so is this Carey guy a literary critic? Not that I have ever been “anti-historiobiographical”, but what does the author’s life or “intent” really have to do with the actual work itself? The work is what it is and IT is the standard by which the critics should approach literature. Some may take the perspective of, “does the standing work reflect the author’s intent?” But really, in my opinion, that is about the closest you should get. I have only read a few of Barthes’ works, but it seems to me that his real argument is to focus on the Culture as the author, that is the influences of everything relating to and preceding the work. In other words, he was merely focusing on a different aspect of authorship rather than the author himself. What are your thoughts on John Carey and what you have posted?
Evan
March 26, 2009 at 10:02 am
Evan,
Yes, Carey is a critic. A rather distinguished one, I think. He published a biography of Donne in 1981, which I haven’t read it, but frequently see it cited.
I think he would respond to you by saying that the literary work isn’t “what it is,” as you say. We all see “different” well-wrought urns, in the sense that we read (interpret) them differently.
Part of that essay is a rebuttal of Barthes’s famous “Death of the Author” piece as irrational–which charge Barthes himself admits in that very essay. That’s the only thing by Barthes that I’ve read, by the way, but I found it dreadful. “Fantasy” (as Carey calls it) feigning as history and philosophy.
Seth
March 26, 2009 at 12:33 pm