ITTOL - Lecture 1 & 2 - Introduction
This is a summary of the first two lectures and readings ( Michel Foucault's What is an Author? and Roland Barthes The Death of The Author) from the open Yale course Introduction to Literary Theory taught by Prof. Paul Fry.
Notes on Lecture One
The first lecture focuses on:
Literary criticism, like literary theory, is concerned with the definition of literature and other relevant issues. The main difference between the two is that "Literary theory is not concerned with [the] evaluation...[or] appreciation [of literature]" preferring to concern itself with "description, analysis and speculation." (§5) What is new, in literary theory compared to literary criticism, is skepticism: "Literary Theory is skeptical about the foundations of its subject matter."
Prof. Fry tells us that this key feature of literary theory, skepticism, is the "natural result" of the development of our "intellectual history" or what is commonly called "modern thought". It begins with Shakespeare (1564-1616), "who is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy", Cervantes (1547-1616), "who is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy" and Descartes (1596-1650), who asks "Well, might I be crazy?" with Descartes emphasizing the distance between our self and the thing we purport to know (§5). In the work of these three men, and the times in general, there is a "nervousness about what I know and how I know it." (§5)
That leads to Kant, in 1796, concluding that "We cannot know the thing in itself." Which leads to Hegel, in 1807, saying we have an "unhappy consciousness"; a consciousness estranged or alienated from the world (the distance between our self and the world has increased). And then we get Marx (1818-1883), Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Freud (1856-1939)(§5).
Marx claims that "God is brought into being the same way objects we make use of are brought into being." His point being that consciousness is inauthentic as "the way in which we believe things, is determined by factors outside [our] control...social, historical, and economic factors...'ideology'" (§5).
Nietzsche claims the problem with our "consciousness" is "the nature of language itself." What we think of as truths are really tired and 'worn-out' "metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, etc." (§5).
Not everyone bought into this way of thinking, in particular the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who refers to the three (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) as "the school of suspicion" and Prof. Fry says they gave rise to "the hermeneutics of suspicion"; a system of asking questions such as those raised by Foucault and Barthes in the assigned readings : Who is the author? Who is the reader?, etc. Prof. Fry also believes Ricoeur erred in leaving out Darwin given his influence on "cognitive science and socio-biological approaches to both literature and interpretive processes." (§6)
Fry claims this "modern thinking" culminated in a moment of history marked by Henry James The Ambassadors (1903) and Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard (1904).
Notes on Lecture Two
The focus of this lecture is on:
The question of agency, our ability to act "with a sense of integrity and not just with a sense that we are being pulled by our strings like a puppet," arises after Darwin. In literary theory "in the absence of human agency, the first sacrifice...is the author." For Foucault, the key point is "in attempting to determine the meaning of a text...should [we] appeal to the authority of the author?" We know he is in the text, either as an Author or an author-function but should we consider him the main authority on what the text means? For Foucault, the answer is no. "We no longer appeal ... to the authority of the author as the source of meaning that we find in a text." (§4)
Barthes and Foucault both consider an appeal to the authority of the author a means of limiting the text's possible meanings. Barthes says, on page 877, "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." Where as Foucault would say the text can still be deciphered with the author-function being "just one aspect of the deciphering process." (§5)
Foucault gets around the problem of how one can admire a particular author and grant him authority by calling him a "founder of discursivity" i.e. instead of talking about specific fields: literature, psychology, philosophy, history, etc. and texts on those fields Foucault calls them discourses which includes everything connected with the field and the discussions they entail. He considers Marx to be the founder of Marxism and Freud to be the founder of Freudianism; he does not consider scientists to be founders i.e. there is no discourse called Newtonianism or Einsteinism or Diracism, etc. [Although Darwinism seems to be an exception to this rule]. For Foucault "a founder of discourse" is someone who "[instigates] ways of thinking without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking authoritatively." (§5)
In one sense, by denying authority to Authors, Foucault and Barthes freed up the space for everyone to become an authority.
Throughout the lecture Prof. Fry reminds us that Foucault, and Barthes, wrote their essays in the late 60's, during the peak of the student protest movement when all authority was being questioned and that Foucault, himself, was the leading French intellectual of the time [which may be why he worked so hard to preserve The Author as a founder of discourse.]
My Response to the Readings and Lecture
What I gather from the two assigned essays is that the author of a text has lost his authority over how his work is interpreted. Foucault removes him from the scene by relegating The Author to an author-function: an element intrinsic to the text but no longer the overriding element. Historically, authors were viewed as authorities, an attitude that probably developed among theologians, who quote authors to give weight to their own pronouncements, and has permeated European universities since the 12th-13th century . A classic example is the centuries long rule of Aristotelian thought; if you could prove your idea stemmed from Aristotle it was taken as more legitimate than an idea arising from an unnamed or anonymous source. Texts became sources of authority only if their author was recognized as an authority. [Ironically, if this Aeon article is to be believed, we may be returning the use of external authority to legitimize ideas.]
Foucault rebels against this method, but only to a point. He tries to differentiate between authors who created new discursive themes i.e. Freud and Marx and those who created new literary genres i.e. Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic novel (Prof. Fry claims Foucault is mistaken in this: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is generally considered to be the first Gothic novel). In Foucault's world, Freud and Marx are still Authors, while Radcliffe is an author-function. He is reducing the author to an element of the text or work much as Euclid broke mathematics down into well defined principles. And like Marx and Freud, he ran into a problem. Fine to say there are multiple elements that make up the state or the person but someone still has to be in charge; there must always be a preferred position, hence he left room for particular Authors. Freudians or Marxists implicitly refer to the authority of Freud or Marx for their particular text or discourse, Gothic novelists do not implicitly or explicitly look to Radcliffe in establishing their texts.
Barthes essay makes much the same point as Foucault except he says the author is dead within the text; writing, he says, "is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin." Instead of Foucault's author-function, in which the text subsumes the author, we have the author as a ghost within the text. Unlike Foucault, Barthes does not attempt to distinguish between authors--they are all dead--for him there is no preferred position in which some authors can be raised to the status of an authority, An Author, discursive or otherwise. All authors are ghosts. But like Foucault (and Freud and Marx) he recognizes that someone must be in a preferred position; this someone, for Barthes, is The Reader, for, as he says "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." He closes the essay by saying "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." In other words, we must remove authority over the text from the author and give it to the reader. He condemns classical literary criticism for ignoring the reader and focusing solely on the writer; apparently failing to recognize that a literary critic is the ultimate reader. He is implicitly saying "ignore the author, listen to the critic".
I find it quite astounding that both these men believe they are rebelling against authority when all they have really done is shifted authority. Barthes has done it explicitly, Foucault, implicitly, since, if the text subsumes the author via the author-function, the authority for the texts meaning can only be invested in the reader. Rather than trying to understand a single voice, that of the original writer, we are now charged to listen to a multitude of voices, all of which can claim to have equal authority!
What does this mean for literature? For the world at large? The value of literature has been its ability to induce empathy. The author tells us a story from a viewpoint that differs from our own, recounts an event we may never experience in a hundred lifetimes and allows us to share in that event, experience it with him. If the author's voice is subsumed, if it ceases to live within the text, can empathy result? If we bury his voice in an analysis of form or grammar or socio-economic or feminist or deconstruction contexts don't we risk losing the unfolding of the human story, without which no literature, history, philosophy, science or art would exist?
Update History: originally posted 03/2011, re-posted 4/25/18, modified 05/26/18
Notes on Lecture One
The first lecture focuses on:
- the relationship between theory and philosophy
- what literature is and what it does
- the emergence of literary theory in the history of modern criticism
- What is literature? (§2)
- How do we know it [literature] when we see it? (§2)
- How do we define [literature]? (§2)
- What causes literature and what are the effects of literature? (§3)
- What is an author? (§3)
- What is a reader? (§3)
- How does reading get done? (§3)
- How do we form the conclusion that we are interpreting something adequately? (§3)
Literary criticism, like literary theory, is concerned with the definition of literature and other relevant issues. The main difference between the two is that "Literary theory is not concerned with [the] evaluation...[or] appreciation [of literature]" preferring to concern itself with "description, analysis and speculation." (§5) What is new, in literary theory compared to literary criticism, is skepticism: "Literary Theory is skeptical about the foundations of its subject matter."
Prof. Fry tells us that this key feature of literary theory, skepticism, is the "natural result" of the development of our "intellectual history" or what is commonly called "modern thought". It begins with Shakespeare (1564-1616), "who is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy", Cervantes (1547-1616), "who is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy" and Descartes (1596-1650), who asks "Well, might I be crazy?" with Descartes emphasizing the distance between our self and the thing we purport to know (§5). In the work of these three men, and the times in general, there is a "nervousness about what I know and how I know it." (§5)
That leads to Kant, in 1796, concluding that "We cannot know the thing in itself." Which leads to Hegel, in 1807, saying we have an "unhappy consciousness"; a consciousness estranged or alienated from the world (the distance between our self and the world has increased). And then we get Marx (1818-1883), Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Freud (1856-1939)(§5).
Marx claims that "God is brought into being the same way objects we make use of are brought into being." His point being that consciousness is inauthentic as "the way in which we believe things, is determined by factors outside [our] control...social, historical, and economic factors...'ideology'" (§5).
Nietzsche claims the problem with our "consciousness" is "the nature of language itself." What we think of as truths are really tired and 'worn-out' "metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, etc." (§5).
For Nietzsche the distortion of truth—that is to say the distortion of the power to observe in consciousness—has as its underlying cause language, the state of language, the status of language. (§5)Then Freud came along and said our consciousness, our "thinking" is being "unsettled...from minute to minute" by the unconscious, for which there is "no objective evidence" but whose existence can be inferred. One example for its existence is the Freudian slip. (§5)
Not everyone bought into this way of thinking, in particular the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who refers to the three (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) as "the school of suspicion" and Prof. Fry says they gave rise to "the hermeneutics of suspicion"; a system of asking questions such as those raised by Foucault and Barthes in the assigned readings : Who is the author? Who is the reader?, etc. Prof. Fry also believes Ricoeur erred in leaving out Darwin given his influence on "cognitive science and socio-biological approaches to both literature and interpretive processes." (§6)
Fry claims this "modern thinking" culminated in a moment of history marked by Henry James The Ambassadors (1903) and Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard (1904).
[I]n each case the speaker argues that consciousness—that is to say, the feeling of being alive and being someone acting in the world—no longer involves agency: the feeling that somehow to be conscious has become to be a puppet, that there is a limitation on what we can do, imposed by the idea that consciousness is determined in ways that we cannot control and cannot get to the better of... (§6)Unfortunately there is not handout of the character speeches Prof. Fry is referring to although we do know they were made by Strether in The Ambassadors and Yepihodov in The Cherry Orchard.
Notes on Lecture Two
The focus of this lecture is on:
- the interrelation between skepticism and determinism
- the nature of discourse
- the theories of Foucault and Barthes as expressed in the assigned readings
"movement of concern about the distance between the perceiver and the perceived, a concern that gives rise to skepticism about whether we can know things as they really are"From this we get a further question of determinism:
"[H]ow [can] we trust the autonomy of consciousness if in fact there's a chance...it is...governed by, controlled by, hidden powers or forces."which is just as important as skepticism. (§1)
The question of agency, our ability to act "with a sense of integrity and not just with a sense that we are being pulled by our strings like a puppet," arises after Darwin. In literary theory "in the absence of human agency, the first sacrifice...is the author." For Foucault, the key point is "in attempting to determine the meaning of a text...should [we] appeal to the authority of the author?" We know he is in the text, either as an Author or an author-function but should we consider him the main authority on what the text means? For Foucault, the answer is no. "We no longer appeal ... to the authority of the author as the source of meaning that we find in a text." (§4)
Barthes and Foucault both consider an appeal to the authority of the author a means of limiting the text's possible meanings. Barthes says, on page 877, "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile." Where as Foucault would say the text can still be deciphered with the author-function being "just one aspect of the deciphering process." (§5)
Foucault gets around the problem of how one can admire a particular author and grant him authority by calling him a "founder of discursivity" i.e. instead of talking about specific fields: literature, psychology, philosophy, history, etc. and texts on those fields Foucault calls them discourses which includes everything connected with the field and the discussions they entail. He considers Marx to be the founder of Marxism and Freud to be the founder of Freudianism; he does not consider scientists to be founders i.e. there is no discourse called Newtonianism or Einsteinism or Diracism, etc. [Although Darwinism seems to be an exception to this rule]. For Foucault "a founder of discourse" is someone who "[instigates] ways of thinking without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking authoritatively." (§5)
In one sense, by denying authority to Authors, Foucault and Barthes freed up the space for everyone to become an authority.
"[T]he author, the traditional idea of the author...can be turned on its ear. It can be understood as a source of new-found authority, of the freedom of one who has been characteristically not free and can be recived by a reading community in those terms." (§5)[Wonder how much of this is related to displacing the authority of the Western Canon?]
Throughout the lecture Prof. Fry reminds us that Foucault, and Barthes, wrote their essays in the late 60's, during the peak of the student protest movement when all authority was being questioned and that Foucault, himself, was the leading French intellectual of the time [which may be why he worked so hard to preserve The Author as a founder of discourse.]
My Response to the Readings and Lecture
What I gather from the two assigned essays is that the author of a text has lost his authority over how his work is interpreted. Foucault removes him from the scene by relegating The Author to an author-function: an element intrinsic to the text but no longer the overriding element. Historically, authors were viewed as authorities, an attitude that probably developed among theologians, who quote authors to give weight to their own pronouncements, and has permeated European universities since the 12th-13th century . A classic example is the centuries long rule of Aristotelian thought; if you could prove your idea stemmed from Aristotle it was taken as more legitimate than an idea arising from an unnamed or anonymous source. Texts became sources of authority only if their author was recognized as an authority. [Ironically, if this Aeon article is to be believed, we may be returning the use of external authority to legitimize ideas.]
Foucault rebels against this method, but only to a point. He tries to differentiate between authors who created new discursive themes i.e. Freud and Marx and those who created new literary genres i.e. Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic novel (Prof. Fry claims Foucault is mistaken in this: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is generally considered to be the first Gothic novel). In Foucault's world, Freud and Marx are still Authors, while Radcliffe is an author-function. He is reducing the author to an element of the text or work much as Euclid broke mathematics down into well defined principles. And like Marx and Freud, he ran into a problem. Fine to say there are multiple elements that make up the state or the person but someone still has to be in charge; there must always be a preferred position, hence he left room for particular Authors. Freudians or Marxists implicitly refer to the authority of Freud or Marx for their particular text or discourse, Gothic novelists do not implicitly or explicitly look to Radcliffe in establishing their texts.
Barthes essay makes much the same point as Foucault except he says the author is dead within the text; writing, he says, "is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin." Instead of Foucault's author-function, in which the text subsumes the author, we have the author as a ghost within the text. Unlike Foucault, Barthes does not attempt to distinguish between authors--they are all dead--for him there is no preferred position in which some authors can be raised to the status of an authority, An Author, discursive or otherwise. All authors are ghosts. But like Foucault (and Freud and Marx) he recognizes that someone must be in a preferred position; this someone, for Barthes, is The Reader, for, as he says "a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." He closes the essay by saying "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." In other words, we must remove authority over the text from the author and give it to the reader. He condemns classical literary criticism for ignoring the reader and focusing solely on the writer; apparently failing to recognize that a literary critic is the ultimate reader. He is implicitly saying "ignore the author, listen to the critic".
I find it quite astounding that both these men believe they are rebelling against authority when all they have really done is shifted authority. Barthes has done it explicitly, Foucault, implicitly, since, if the text subsumes the author via the author-function, the authority for the texts meaning can only be invested in the reader. Rather than trying to understand a single voice, that of the original writer, we are now charged to listen to a multitude of voices, all of which can claim to have equal authority!
What does this mean for literature? For the world at large? The value of literature has been its ability to induce empathy. The author tells us a story from a viewpoint that differs from our own, recounts an event we may never experience in a hundred lifetimes and allows us to share in that event, experience it with him. If the author's voice is subsumed, if it ceases to live within the text, can empathy result? If we bury his voice in an analysis of form or grammar or socio-economic or feminist or deconstruction contexts don't we risk losing the unfolding of the human story, without which no literature, history, philosophy, science or art would exist?
Update History: originally posted 03/2011, re-posted 4/25/18, modified 05/26/18