1 EX302 Modern Literary Theory Assignment 2 Word Count:1520

The death of the author may be described as the birth of discourse- discuss in relation to two of the texts studied between weeks one and six of the course.

In order to discuss the above question, it is important to have a full understanding of what is meant by discourse in this instance. At its simplest, most elementary level, discourse is the exchange of ideas or information through the medium of literature. When one looks further into the critical definitions of discourse however, things become more complex.

One of the primary interests of post-structuralist critics was the tracking of discourse as text back to its source in the spoken language of everyday life (p6 Norton Anthology1). This materialist theory, often thought to be anti-elitist, garnered support from lauded critics such as Michel Foucault and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Discourse theory suggested that far from being created purely by one source (the mind of the writer), literature stems from a language uttered by embodied subjects situated historically in contentious social spheres that are regulated by powerful institutions(p62). This idea reinvents previously held hypothesis that pigeonhole the generation of literature as either a purely creative or mimetic activity and instead creates a new image of texts as social products. Often previously the author was
1

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton

and and

Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001

2

Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001

2 seen as a lone figure giving life to truths universal to all mankind (p63) however the post structuralist view of discourse exchanges the author figure for one termed the scriptor. Unlike the traditional Author-God figure this scriptor does not magically generate texts from some omniscient place of greater understanding than we, the readers, possess. Instead he or she rehashes and puts together elements of the social norms, codes and traditions by which he himself is surrounded and influenced.

In From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, the second essay from his collection of four The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin took this idea one step further, describing how elements from the huge cannon of past texts have ultimately come together to form what we recognise as the modern novel. Because of the emphasis he put on social factors affecting

literature and language, Bakhtin proposed the modern novel to be heteroglossic, a term he explains in Discourse in the Novel4. Heteroglossic qualities are common to all languages but are extralinguistic (existing apart from the rules and regulations of language e.g grammar), for example ideological positioning and perspective. The opposite of these would be monoglossic discourse, i.e discourse from one singular origin and viewpoint. Bakhtin saw monoglossic discourse as having two distinct characteristics or poles the individual speaking and the language system being used. Texts considered in the light of the traditional author figure would be seen as monoglossic, since they stem from a distinct persona or set of beliefs and are focussed entirely on setting out the authors message through the medium of a strictly modulated linguistic system.

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton

and

Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001

4

Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 4 th edition (London: Arnold, 2001)

3 Discourse theory does not disallow creativity or illusion. Although discourse theorists sees texts as amalgamations of social and cultural queues and codes, therefore representing reality, they also acknowledge that the version of reality reflected in a text may also be subject to distortion i.e literature represents reality but reality is grounded in convention, not nature, and it is subject to illusion.(p65). According to discourse theory life itself, including ones inner life, is a regulated social occurrence and therefore subject to the same forces through which discourse is created, i.e cultural, chronological and geographical circumstances. This means that the scriptors internal existence can also be factored into the creative (or perhaps constructive) process.

A great positive of treating discourse as a social text is that instead of being a reductive outlook- expecting one theory of literature to apply universally to every text in every culture and period- it allows for multiple perspectives on and theories of literature to apply dependant on the circumstance in which the discourse itself is created. This has been described as pluralizing literature by allowing it to exist simultaneously in multiple forms.

Of course, to fully understand whether discourse might be considered a result of the so-called death of the author, one must first grasp what function ridding oneself of the author figure serves. It has long been debated whether literature itself is created by the author or by the reader interpreting the language or signals set down by the author according to his or her own disposition. Mallarme was one of the first critics to prioritise literary techniques which could minimalise the intentions, message and
5

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton

and

Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001

4 persona of the author (p1626 6). The term the death of the author however, was coined by Roland Barthes in the essay of the same name within his 1977 work Image, Discourse, Text. The essay was an attack on the traditional, bibliographic approach to criticism, a point some claim invalidates its message since Barthes critical career is often thought to be a displacement activity to distract him from the novel he longed to pen. The critic perceived the author as a modern figure, a result of English Empiricism. Barthes sees this image of the character of the author as a product of the notion of the individual. He felt that this notion was found its genesis during the Reformation and French Revolution and describes the great anxiety of men of letters at the time to unite their personas with their works. To a modern reader this idea might be best illustrated using the example of the celebrity author phenomena which has become more and more prevalent over the last twenty or so years, with writers like J.K Rowling becoming famous as a package- their individual public personas and works inexorably linked.

Barthes disagreed with the way in which the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always..the voice of a single person, the author confiding in us, proposed instead that [the process of] writing is the destruction of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing(p1466 7), the body being the author. In laymans terms, he felt that through the endeavour of writing, one severs oneself from the resulting literature. The figure of the author or origin is thereby rendered

Vincent B. Leitch, Gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton and Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001 7 Vincent B. Leitch, Gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton and Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001

5 irrelevant, or as the title suggests dead. He goes on in his essay to compound this point, noting that As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively. The voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins8.

Barthes did not assign his hypothesis exclusively to literature. Like Bakhtin, he felt that his ideas could also be applied to linguistics, even going so far as to suggest that linguistics provided scientific evidence for his work on literature. This is partly due to the fact that linguistically speaking, the entire existence of enunciation functions perfectly without the interjection of the interlocutors (the linguistic equivalent to the author) persona. Language, he suggests, knows only the one dimension of subject. Simply having a subject present is enough to hold together whole reams of language and create sense of them without the need for a known author. Here he draws upon Brechts9 suggestion that an audience must have a certain amount of distance from the work they are observing, whether this be theatre or in this case literature, in order to maintain a critical and objective view of what they are being shown. This idea of alienating or distancing an audience is rooted in the Russian Formalist belief in making strange and was described by critic Victor Schlovsky10 as the essence of all art.

So how could this process of killing off the author and focussing entirely on the properties of whatever literary work is in question possibly lead to the birth of discourse? If as in Barthes essay, the death of the author creates a new voice

Vincent B. Leitch, Gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton and Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001 9 Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 91. 10 Shklovsky, Victor Art as Technique, excerpts selected by Vahid Norouzalibeik

6 existing in the present with no definable origin, then the death itself may be perceived generating a new mode of literature with characteristics ideal to give rise to discourse theory.

Traditionally when critically analysing a piece, one would superimpose the authors own background and even personal beliefs such as political agenda onto the text, thus reducing our own interpretative input as readers. If, however, we follow Barthes school of thought and see the process of writing itself as one which alienates work from origin leaving a text entirely open to analysis on its own merit, we may then begin to see what the post structuralists saw- text or discourse as a bringing together of social factors and codes via the medium of the writer, who now serves as sort of enabler, putting together the building blocks of a specific literature, peculiar to his or her own society, which were already in existence.

Through the death of the Author-God figure, we simultaneously allow the audience themselves the process of interpretation and move away from the monoglossic text. We thereby create a centrifugal, heteroglossic text, pushing out language into new combinations of social codes and rhetorical strategies and eventually giving birth to new forms of discourse.

7 Bibliography Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 91. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 4th edition (London: Arnold, 2001) Shklovsky, Victor Art as Technique, excerpts selected by Vahid Norouzalibeik Stable link: http://www.vahidnab.com/defam.htm (not directly quoted) Vincent B. Leitch, Gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Leitch, Cain, Finke, W.W.Norton and Company Inc., New York, London, pub. 2001