Citations after the death of the author

Leonardo, 1992

squares and an untitled one) Dan to suggested that it is theory, rather than any property of the object, that makes a work what it is and that enables its interpretation. By analogy, states of mind in the audience or the artist are not the criterion of whether something is art; rather the theory that helps to constitute the artworld is. Danto called in effect for a Copernican turn in aesthetics that would allow us to recognize that the objects of the artworld are constituted by theory. Such G~ry Shapiro (educator),

British Journal of Aesthetics, 1990

1992

This essay is a critical examination of David Carrier\u27s Artwriting (1987), which offered a philosophical account of the implicit strategies of narrative and presentation deployed by a wide range of art historians and critics. Here, this author raises some questions concerning Carrier\u27s attempt to describe or define a genre of \u27art-writing\u27 distinct from philosophical aesthetics; he also discusses Carrier\u27s views in the context of those writers whom Carrier examines in Artwriting

2014

Margit Sutrop, The Death of the Literary Work, Philosophy and Literature, Volume 18, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 38-49, 1994

Curiously, there has been a lot of discussion about the death of the author but the death of the literary work has hardly been resisted. It has been taken for granted that literary work closes itself on a signifed, that the work is closed, finished object which hides its meaning. In this article I show that there are good reasons to doubt this claim. In the first part of the article I argue that the literary work has lost its content because the notion of the text has has such an important extension. Many reader-oriented critics are convinced that every text has its meaning only in reading. As the meaning is produced, assembled and constituted in the reading process, it is always subjective, individual, plural. The literary work becomes the victim of the text and will be sidelined. In the second part of the article I will compare the phenomenological literary theory of the Polish aesthetician Roman Ingarden and the reader-response theory (reception aesthetics) of the German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser. I will focus on how Iser will make an important extension of the notion of the text - in the spirit of Barthes- at the same time giving the notion of the literary work a totally new content.

In his 1967 essay, The Death of the Author 1 , the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes argues that a piece of writing and the intentions and dispositions of the author are unrelated; that a reader need not, indeed cannot, take into account the dispositions and intentions of the author while reading and that the only meaning in the work is that derived from the readers individual response to the writing. This paper claims that on the contrary an assumption of 'authorial intent' is a prerequisite for making sense of any piece of writing. The paper uses the specifics of narrative form and the latest research in human cognition to illustrate