Wow. Posting my thoughts on Dr. M's questions two weeks in a row. Something must be wrong.
The Author
Q: B&R propose that the "author is a sort of phantom." Explain what they mean and its implications.
A: The author is concealed from the reader by the characters and world that the author creates (the text). Even if the author writes in first person, the "I" of the story is arguably a character, not the author. Even if the author injects parts of his life and experience into the story, the story is still a conflation or reality and imagination. The reader has no access to the author other than through the text, and the text hides the author. So, while the reader may get a sense of the author through the text (for instance, it was fairly obvious to me that Orson Scott Card was a Mormon after reading a couple of his book), that "knowledge" is really the reader's idea of the author. The reader does not meet the author in the text -- or the author met is the particular face of the author presented in the text, a fragment of a larger whole.
Q: What is "the intentional fallacy."
A: Wimsatt and Beardsley proposed that the author's intent is "neither available nor desirable" for understanding or critically analyzing the text. Since everything is mediated by language, even if we asked the author, their answer would simply be another text open to interpretation. Given some of the other discussion in class regarding the psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious and its unknowable role in human actions, it is doubtful that even the author can give a complete explanation of everything they intended. Therefore, readers should not focus on the author's intention but their interpretation of the author's work.
Q: Identify one way in which "authorial intention" is problematized or "falters", according to BR.
A: See the sentence regarding the unknowable unconscious in the answer to the previous question. Also, modern linguistics theory suggests that language itself introduces limits and constraints on the author, predisposing him to certain paths and modes of speech (writing) and discourse and further limiting the freedom of his intent.
Monuments
Q: What is Frank Kermode’s definition of a classic, and what are its implications for notion of authorial intention?
A: Kermode defines a classic as a work whose "instrinsic qualities" endure but that is open to multiple interpretations and reinterpretations. The classic survives because it can mean different things at different times. This undermines the idea of authorial intention because later interpretations may have nothing to do with the author's conscious (or even unconscious) intentions at the time of writing. Kermode says that the text is subject to the reader's interpretation and is "not a message from one mind to another."
Q: The value of the monument and the process of monumentalization are driven by a double impulse: to remember and to forget. Explain what this double impulse means.
A: On the one hand, the monument seeks to remind those who remain of the thing it honors. On the other hand, it buries or conceals the thing it seeks to honor, putting it out of sight and causing us to forget. For example, in Milton's poem on Shakespeare, he points readers away from Shakespeare's physical body and toward his literary body. Don't bother looking at his grave. That body doesn't matter. Look at what he wrote. That's the important (and immortal) body. This directs us away from the man, making him accessible only through the texts he left us.
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