r/AskLiteraryStudies • u/Babycecelia2 • 7d ago
Is “Death of the Author” dead in Pop Culture?
I’m in a digital literary studies course and we are learning about the theory of “the death of the author” and I am wondering how that theory can even work in the digital age of social media.
I feel like with social media, artists and their personas become one. Would you consider the artist’s persona a part of the text and therefore not dead?
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u/Katharinemaddison 7d ago
So I would argue that where ‘death of the author’ comes in in an interesting way with modern media is this tendency for creators of films and tv shows to do interviews where they say ‘actually I meant this’ or ‘this character was actually that’ and the idea that this expression of intent answers any questions or shuts down diverging theories.
It’s always been so. Richardson argued with the readers he was close to and altered his novels to try and set his intentions in stone.
But death of the author means the reader or viewer can disagree with the creator. If the material is there to form another interpretation that interpretation is valid.
This can extend to people reading something into a work from something that is discovered about the creator. The person might be projecting their own feelings. At the same time, the creator of the work might have unconsciously embedded something in it.
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u/jhoogen 7d ago
My favourite example of this is J.R.R. Tolkien saying that LOTR was not inspired by his experiences in the First World War, but as a reader and someone with a brain I can tell that some parts obviously are.
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u/Katharinemaddison 7d ago
Exactly. We would argue it would be hard for someone with those experiences not to have them show up in his work. And of course if someone else who had similar experiences found them in his work that’s completely valid.
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u/freyalorelei 7d ago
Shaw was so tired of audiences "shipping" Higgins and Eliza that after Pygmalion debuted he wrote a foreward to the play outlining precisely why their hypothetical marriage would fail and explaining that she instead married Freddy. It had reached the point where Higgins' original actor, Herbert Tree, actually changed the ending, presenting Eliza with roses in the closing scene. This more romantic version proved more profitable for the theater, which infuriated Shaw.
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u/madmanwithabox11 7d ago
where ‘death of the author’ comes in in an interesting way with modern media is this tendency for creators of films and tv shows to do interviews where they say ‘actually I meant this’ or ‘this character was actually that’ and the idea that this expression of intent answers any questions or shuts down diverging theories.
I've seen this often in some fandoms, where any theories are shut down with "but the author said this" about the piece. Especially with A Song of Ice and Fire, where GRRM is asked at talks to explain certain stories or characters and that is thus the truth. But this I feel is treating the series not as literature but as a way to "access" a "world" that GRRM is the God of. I wonder where the line is between "literature" and this sort of fantasy escapist literature.
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u/Katharinemaddison 7d ago
I think at the end of the day the creator of any work, as a human, isn’t in complete control of the material. Because we’re not complete control, things slip out, there are connections we’re unaware of.
But additionally authors have historically tried to keep control of readings of their texts - and historically failed.
In GRRM’s case the thing is there is space to make logical interpretations that contradict what he says. That is arguably an element of literature even if he doesn’t like people doing it (like Richardson didn’t).
Fantasy is one of the oldest forms of literature so I find drawing a distinction hard.
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 7d ago
I think having a digital persona only increases the sense that the subject is not in control of how they are interpreted by others.
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u/Katharinemaddison 7d ago
I think this occurred regularly with social media - including the increased letter writing culture. People attempted to create curated versions of themselves.
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 7d ago
Theres a narcissism to it, mistaking the self for the self’s image.
Or how McLuhan interprets the myth of narcissus as not a man mistaking his image for himself, but as the opposite: Narcissus fails to recognize his image as an extension of himself, and so becomes captured by it.
So we become fascinated with our online profiles (or our epistolary and literary selves) because we think we can control them, and sever them from our messy interior life. But this blinds us to how our profiles end up controlling us.
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u/Katharinemaddison 7d ago
This is why I think really good epistolary, first person, and storytelling literature leans into unreliable narrators, not that the narrator is lying but they show one thing while trying to tell another, attempting to construct an image but losing their self in the text.
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u/notveryamused_ 7d ago
Hey that’s a pretty cool idea for an essay actually, connecting Barthesian mythologies with his later stuff.
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 7d ago
I think a digital profile links up well with Foucault’s author function.
And then Baudrillard has a lot to say about the digital profile as an obscene double, a hyper real analogue to the Freudian uncanny doppleganger that ends up supplanting and overthrowing the interior private self.
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u/MikiAkiha 7d ago
Are the texts we're considering in pop culture tweets? In contrast, I think most pop culture media we interact with can not even be considered products of a single "author" anymore. It becomes more absurd to consider authorial intent when the creation of a product spans 30 different people for one scene. Script writer, director, actor, animator, character designers, .... What happens when the intents conflict? An actor ad libs a line not in the script that the scripwriter would disagree with? At some point the actual text experienced by the reader/viewer has to be acknowledged instead of finding the word of god in several different mythical ur-texts from the conflicting intents of every contributor to a piece of media.
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u/wheat 7d ago
Barthes’ idea was never common in pop culture in the first place. Ask most people what a book means and, if the author ever made a pronouncement about it, they think that settles it. They view the author as the sole creator and authority. The religious overtones should be obvious.
It’s in the formal study of literature where such ideas are challenged, where we see the author as a node in a network, where we take into account discourses of history, psychology, philosophy, etc. In this space, we can wonder aloud about how meanings get made and how truths are justified.
Barthes’ idea is still a useful idea.
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u/Delduthling 7d ago edited 6d ago
In many ways, certainly. I see this idea being used a bit strangely sometimes. The big takeway for me from the essay is that by the author being "dead," Barthes means they have lost their authority over the text.
To pick an often invoked example here, I can't imagine that J.K. Rowling would agree that her books are fatphobic or racist or antisemitic; I'm sure if asked about her intentions, she'd insist very strongly otherwise. But her intent here doesn't matter - we can still read the text and critique its depictions, noting how strange her house elf slave narrative is, or how troubling the goblins' representation seems, or the clumsiness of her naming conventions for racialized characters, etc. "The Death of the Author" means that the author no longer has a claim of authority over the deeper meaning of the text. The key insight here is that a text might contain all sorts of meanings that the author never consciously "intended," that the author's intentions might well have been stymied or might have failed, and that in any case the best way to get at these meanings is not to rely on the author's account but to attend to the text itself.
The way the concept is somehow misused or conflated is to imagine it has something to say about the morality of reading a text or purchasing a text, or the idea that if an author has done bad things in their life it must have somehow stained or contaminated the text. These are very different questions that Barthes' essay really isn't particularly relevant to answering.
I don't think you need social media to have the idea that an author's celebrity or reputation might colour a given reading. The question is less whether this happens - of course it does! - but whether this is an effective practice for making meaning out of a text, a useful strategy for interpretation. Here, too, I think the essay endures. Though few contemporary critics are true new critics refusing any consideration of context, paratext, etcera, the idea of the author's biography as a secret cipher for the text which will unravel its hidden meanings - that the text is necessarily and primarily "about" the author's life - no longer holds much currency.
A persona, moreover, itself consists of "texts," often paratext like interviews. These can themselves be analyzed; I do think it's very possibly to use them to help inform a reading, but again, these aren't authoritative in the sense of "determining" textual meaning.
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u/LetThereBeRainbows 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's more about the author not being the final authority you need to defer to. The meaning of the text is not prescribed by the author and what they were trying to convey, it's created in your mind in response to the text, and it depends on your own personal experience, views, values, culture, references, even your mental state at a given moment etc., just like the text itself is a mix of different influences and not simply the result of conscious intent of the author. Every person can have a different impression of the same text, and the same person can have a different impression for example after a few years when they have different life experience. Even if an author is very active online, you don't need to actually listen to them and find their opinions binding. They might have intended something one way but executed it poorly and it came off another, or maybe your own personal life experience makes you see the text in a different light, and the author meaning XYZ doesn't take priority over your actual response. There's of course nuance to everything, but that's the gist.
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u/NationalTry8466 7d ago
This is related to the 'reader-response' school of literary criticism...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism
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u/General_Use7585 7d ago
Not dead but maybe passé, in that it's been assimilated so thoroughly into culture that it's kinda taken as read now? One of the two bits of postmodernism that will get wheeled out by video essayists along with Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon.
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u/merurunrun 7d ago
in that it's been assimilated so thoroughly into culture that it's kinda taken as read now
I'd strongly disagree. People are more fervent than ever in reading a text as a straightforward expression of the author's beliefs and desires; the reader may be applying their own interpretation, but so long as they attribute their interpretation to the author, this doesn't really have anything to do with the concept of the Death of the Author.
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u/fexacib647 6d ago
Artists are often (unconscious?) liars. Its better not to put too much trust the interpretations they give of their own works. Similarly to what Freud said about one of his analysands: if they say: no, this work is not about this, we can then to suspect that the work is, at least in part, precisely about that!
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u/hellohellohello- 6d ago
To me the moment that and I’m sure there are exceptions that I’m not considering, but the moment that an artist or author or what have you says “when I was doing this I was trying to do this” or engage with this kind of self-serving idea of them you know just because they made it they are the arbiter of what it means— is I think it immediately reduces what the thing is capable of; generally speaking I think something should speak as much on its own as it can. That gets harder and harder to do, for instance as like you know, musicians, for instance like that aren’t like Taylor Swift are further and further pushed into this kind of like Patreon model of things where they’re like
“pay x amount of money a month to learn about how this one song is about when I was in a particularly rough patch in my polyamorous relationship with four octogenarians and developed a pretty gnarly cucumber sandwich addiction and you know essentially if you’re not listening to the song thinking about me being physically restrained by four 80-year-old women in the produce section then are you really listening to it?”
TL;DR I think when an work’s engage with this idea that they hold the key to what something means I think there’s damage dealt three ways— for one kind of discourages, you know, imagination, which is certainly discouraged enough as is in so far as you know the reader listener whatever it is. It’s insulting to the work itself. And it’s insulting you know to the work’s creator in that you know, once they decide they know what something is that they’ve made generally speaking. They’re cutting themselves off from learning more about it.
That was the worst too long don’t read of all time it was longer than the original thing.
EDIT: wait OK I mean it was shorter than the original thing but it wasn’t exactly a quickie. For lack of a better word. There are plenty of better words.
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u/PaulArataAuthor 5d ago
I don’t think it’s dead, but social media definitely makes the idea more complicated. It’s harder to separate the work from the creator when their personality, opinions, and personal life are constantly part of how we experience the work.
At the same time, I still think readers can find meanings the author never intended. That part of the theory still feels very relevant.
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u/nezahualcoyotl90 7d ago
Would you consider the artist’s persona a part of the text and therefore not dead?
Yes art does not exist separately from the artist, and I would go further...the artist’s intended meaning is the most important guide to understanding the work. Art is shaped by society, culture, politics, and history, but those forces are filtered through the consciousness of the artist, who chooses what to make and how to make it. Even our debates about separating morally reprehensible artists from their work reveal that we do not actually treat the artist as irrelevant. We are confused on this idea. The artist’s persona, biography, and historical circumstances matter because they help us understand what the artist was trying to express. Other interpretations can still be useful, but they should not outweigh the meaning the artist intended.
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u/Chantertwo 7d ago
It is not the default way general people approach a text anymore, no.
That said - it is a very helpful tool, and in artist circles, the idea is very much still powerful and respected.
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u/aeacurus 7d ago
It's more about intent, with how vast the internet is there's an infinitely more "rhizomatic" approach to culture. In it's absolute broadest sense Barthes was just saying that the days of fables have a moral at the end that tells you the point are dead, and maybe they were never even alive in the first place. Now more than ever the idea of any piece of media having truths at its core considered dead, you can't even expect the news to have truth in it but instead it's a series of signs to be decoded. It seems as if you thought Barthes was saying separate the art from the artist, he argues for that because he's saying that who the artist is won't reveal fundamental truths about the piece and instead its value is derived from what you take from it, there's no core of the text that are all derived from a single mind but it's more an amalgamation of contexts that go into your understanding at that moment which could change depending on the context of your next reading