Abstract

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 We will hereinafter discuss the author’s philosophy on gnoseological and historical premises. More precisely, by exploring the genealogy of the idea of the “Death of the Author” from modernism to postmodernism, we will analyse the concepts and ideologies that have become the stratagem of the denial of western literary canon, as well as the denial of equilibrium between philosophical and literary identity and universality. By treating the works of philosophers, authors, and fundamental semiologists who perpetuated the idea of the Death of the Author, we will observe how the latter gradually fled from the philosophy of doubt and as mea culpa admitted that without the author’s authority the philosophical and literary legacy is no longer the theatre of memory, but the abyss of oblivion. Moreover, with fundamental examples, we will observe the influence of this philosophy in the process of studying of the literature.

Highlights

  • We will hereinafter discuss the author’s philosophy on gnoseological and historical premises

  • The fundamental blow to the traditional concept of the author was given by Roland Barthes, who in his famous essay wrote: “We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 1977a: 148)

  • Deconstruction has approached nearest to orthodoxy in literary or para-literary disciplines, in the sense that it is still fairly imprudent even for an academic hoping for tenure or promotion to express open hostility to it. (Grant 2003: 86). According to this philosophy of alignment and at the same time of the denial of stabilized signifiers, it appears that the utility of literature teaching has been touched, the author has been broken as a sole ethical principal of literary interpretation, and, in the name of permanent fictionality, the search for truth as an ideal, as the primary quest for knowledge, has not been favoured, leaving room for a persistent, even contemptuous game, to canonical authors of European literature as well as to the established authors of identity literatures

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Summary

The Icons of Author Denial

Within the philosophy of literature, the concept of the author has always incited perplexity of the debates, which as old as they are new, apparently, will continue to be such until the phenomenon of literature changes itself, as immanent human mimetic requirement or as a requirement for the creation of the idiosyncratic artistic world. The demand for an idealness of literature without the author’s presence, without his influence, seems easy to design, difficult to realize On this occasion, we emphasize that “the idea of author’s killing” is not new, Thomas Stearns Eliot can be considered its predecessor, who in 1919 in his famous essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”, while discussing the linkage between the writer and his text, argued for literary text to be impersonal, distanced from personal sentiments. In further justification of this philosophy, Blanchot takes the examples of death in Stéphane Mallarme’s verses, literature as the death space of Franz Kafka, the philosophy of Igitur, etc., in order to erase all signs of metaphysics of the presence This is a continuation of nihilism, a demand for a world of anonymity, which this philosopher wanted in life as well. This is putting in doubt the relationship of this philosophy to the concept of tradition and heritage, as a requirement for the theatre of memory and as a struggle against oblivion

The Deconstruction of the Tradition
Philosophy of Doubt Abandoned
Rejection of “The Death of the Author”
Conclusion
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