branching out in the blogging world- author function

I found this blog about the new movie “300” and the idea of the author function. I found it interesting because it tied into my personal life. My father wanted to see this movie very badly but my mother refused because she heard that it had had the same director who did Dawn of the Dead in 2004, which my father watched as well. She immediately thought both films were too violent for her and did not go see it. She is doing what we talked about, associating the piece art with the author. She can not get away from tying the author to their work. And in the other sense neither can my dad because his reasons for wanting to see “300” were the fact that it had the reputation to be violent and action packed.
This blog also discusses Foucault and Barthes. He writes, “As Barthes wrote, “the author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’”(DA 143). Basically, modern society ties text to the author.” I feel that this is true. We as a society strive to know who wrote anything that we read and consider work. We even need to know the author in things outside of text such as music, paintings etc. As we read in Foucault and the blogger points out that in earlier times if a piece of work had an anonymous author we did not view it as true. We even then needed to tie the author with their work to make it have any meaning.
He then discusses what Barthes says about what happens once the author is gone; “ […]the single meaning of the text attributed to the Author (what Barthes called the theological meaning, since it is unitary and absolute), is replaced by a multiplicity of meanings, which depends on the reading. In another essay in Image-Music-Text, From Work to Text, Barthes claims that the reader gives the text its meaning, not the Author.” He talks about this in relation to critics. He uses critic’s comments on the movie “300” in the beginning of his blog and then talks about how irrelevant they are based on this idea. Since the reader is giving the meaning there are multiple meanings that one can come to. If there are multiple meanings the blogger says that there is nothing to criticize because it is a decentered text. I have a question about this though….is not a critic a reader as well? I feel that the critic can come up with an opinion because they are a reader who gives meaning to the text.

"What is an Author?"

According to Foucault an author is very important and differs from a writer. An author is given a name and the name means something, it has importance. You can link a piece of work to an author through the way it’s written, the style, phrases used, ideas and also the timeline like if historical dates are mentioned do they coincide with the life span of the author. He also says that the name of an author is a description which I understand. Once you have the name of an author it is not only their name but it describes who they are and their thoughts. He used the example of Aristotle. When one hears that name you automatically think a great thinker and philosopher and it determines what kind of work you will be reading.
Foucault then discusses the word, ‘work’ and what it actually means. When we call something a work it is because it is written by someone and that someone is an ‘author’ (p 1262). He is saying that for something to have credit as being a work of literature or a work of art it needs a name, an author to go with it. He also says, “[…] if some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate […] the word ‘work’ and the unity it designates” (1262). Again he is saying that for a work to be a work it needs the author to be recognized.
He also discusses the idea of ecriture which indicates writing as the interaction of presence and absence. I didn’t quit understand him until he said that you see references to the author in his absence. I do understand what he is trying to say. It goes back to being able to link different works to the same author through using the language, ideas, and phrases used. Even if a text’s author is unknown you could link it through clues that the author would use even though his/her name is absent.
I thought it was interesting to read about how works were only called scientific once they had the name of the author to go along with them (1264). By giving the name of the author it “marks a proven discourse” (1264). It is true because when we see an anonymous author we immediately want to know who it is that wrote what we just read so that we can think it to be more believable and real. I don’t know if this is the best example but it is all I can thin of at the moment. When the Harry Potter books first came out and you found out that the author was J.K. Rowling, yes you had a name but you had also found out that it was a pseudonym. Immediately I know I wanted to know who it really was and I had originally thought is was a male author but later found out it was a female who picked an ambiguous alias because she thought it might help the sale of the book. I think in our society we always want to know everything and we won’t stop until we do or we will not believe something until we get the answer.
I also thought how Foucault talked about more then literary texts having authors. It is true that art, music even theories have authors. Homer and Aristotle as he uses as examples are authors of theories. He feels that to be a “great” author one needs to not only write their own text but also make it possible for others to write about the subject and write about differences they see. I agree with him on this I feel that a great author needs to influence others and create controversy as well.

Freud and Lacan

I thought Freud and Lacan were very interesting to read and I definitely understand the material more and more as the semester goes on. I think I have trained my mind to be more open and less rigid when reading this type of material. I do think that some of Freud’s thoughts are a little bizarre but he makes good points. When he talks about dreams being an outlet for our repressed desires or fears that want to make their way into our conscious mind I agree (Barry 99). I feel that dreams always have meaning whether it is blatantly obvious or disguised; there is a reason behind it. I thought the way in which he tied the unconscious to literature was interesting as well. He says, the unconscious is like a play, poem or novel. They all can not speak directly and explicitly but they do so through images, symbols, emblems, or metaphors. Literature as well expresses and shows experience in these same ways. (Barry 102).
Where I started to think he went a little of-the-wall with his ideas was when he discussed Dora. I do not feel she wanted what happened to her to happen. I feel Freud is male oriented in his thoughts and a sexist especially in this case. It just aggravated me that he would say it was her fault that an older man came on to her, because she obviously suffered from this experience and his so called help was definitely no help to her at all. I did however see where he was coming from when he said that Hamlet had the Oedipus complex. I mean I have read the story before and he does hesitate to kill his uncle to avenge his father’s death. I do not know if he did in fact hesitate because he wanted to sleep with his mother but I can see why Freud may think this and I feel his thoughts are more justified here then in Dora’s story.
Lacan was very interesting as well. His thoughts made me think just like Freud’s did. When he changed Descartes’ famous saying of, “I think, therefore I am” to “I am where I think not,” I thought that was very clever of him. I agree with it too. I do believe that our true selves lie in our unconscious and we let those thoughts and feelings out every day in some way whether we are aware of it or not. Our unconscious affects our conscious life.
Lacan feels that language is a system that is already complete before we enter into it. He says that characterization (which needs to be rejected) must be viewed as assemblages (a collection of people or things) of signifiers. When the story by Edgar Allen Poe is discussed I understood what Lacan was getting at. The letter in the story is a symbolic object of the unconscious self because we never find out what the letter says just that is very important and effects all the actions of the story. Just like the letter’s contents being unknown so is our unconscious contents. Our unconscious effects our behavior just as the letter affected the characters behavior in the story. Psychoanalysis which deals with repetition and substitution is represented in the story by the investigation of the crime by Dupin. It is repetitive because Dupin steals the letter from the Minister who stole the letter from the Queen. His theft is achieved by substituting the real letter with a fake one.
When he says that all words are put away letters I understood the idea of the signifier having no simple connection to the signified. The signified is always lost he says. In this story we see the significance of the letter but not what is signified within it. The analogy he uses with the envelopes being the signifiers that can not be opened leaving the signified to remain hidden I thought was a good way to explain this idea.
I really enjoyed reading Poe’s story through Lacan’s ideas. It helped me understand Lacan better and I thought it was interesting. It also made me realize what I want to do for the essay!