Good Readers and Good Writers

"So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers

My analysis of What is an Author by Foucault:

With post-modernism, it is believed that human progress is inevitable. The social conditions of the author permeates his written work and the topic of the text takes into consideration the epistemic assumptions of natural scientists, political economists and linguists making subjective, the human ideology. Even truths are subjective; illusory. Post-modernism asks that one question past knowledge, which often alludes to the two sides of the same coin, and focuses on what makes these two sides different and how the two intersect, thus contributing to a universal knowledge. This knowledge influences art, philosophy, the social sciences and makes one questions the validity of it.  

"Even now, when we study the history of a concept, a literary genre, or a branch of philosophy, these concerns assume a relatively weak and secondary position in relation to the solid and fundamental role of an author and his works." (p 1476) According to Foucault, two underlying precepts exist in a literary work. The first suggests that "the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of 'expression;' it only refers to itself, yet is not restricted to the confines of interiority. . . .The second precept is "the kinship between writing and death." (p 1477) That somewhere in during the creation of the text, the author becomes one with the text, rather, in the creation process, the text becomes the entity and the author is merely the vehicle for which the text becomes; the author is the void the reader is left with when finishing a novel. When the last page is turned, and the final sentence read, before one even closes the book, a sense of mourning takes place. The author has disappeared and we are left feeling his immortality. As Keep, McLaughlin and Parmar once said, "The author may be dead, but his ghosts maybe even more eloquent."

My analysis of Death of an Author by Barthes:

Barthes argument is for examining the text itself, without judging the author, his political views or history. "The context in which the work was written, the era in which the work was written, must all be considered when analyzing a text, as each element contributes to the text" but the reader should disassociate the author from his work. The authors job is to accurately express his passions and feelings and such, but being that they are subjective, the reader needs to interpret the meaning based on his own intellectual experiences and take into consideration the social and historical factors present at the time the text was written, as each text contains multiple layers and meanings. The social and historical atmosphere is contingent upon the actions of others and is open to interpretation, thus applying this criticism toward the author renders the text secondary in its relevance. The readers interpretation may or may not mean what the author intended for it to mean, as the author is no doubt shaped by his environment. having said that, his impressions in which the reader may detect in a text, does not mean to validate those impressions for society as a whole.

Because the author's experiences, his foreknowledge and the socio-political and historical background and that which he was subjected, by merely being alive during said period in which the text was written, ultimately influences the text. The meaning the author brings to the text, may not be the same meaning implied or as interpreted by the reader. It is up to the reader to educate themselves on the era in which the text was written, and take into consideration the ideology at its base. The reader then, should be smart enough to entertain an idea without accepting it. The idea, thought, or concept laid out in the structure of the text, might be representative of the author's principle's, but one should not take literally the implied meaning, it is but one side of many sides to a story.

Source: Cain, Finke, Johnson, Leitch, McGowan, Sharpley-Whiting, and Williams. The Norton
Anthology of Theory & Criticism. 2nd Ed. Published by WW Norton and Company, New
York/London. 2010.

("It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle)