This is for those who know what “death of the author” means or who is willing to look it up, but in short, it can summed up to mean “whatever a work of fiction means is up to the people to decide on”.
Question inspired by an incident the other day where I saw someone one day cite “death of the author” when asked why he went into the womens’ bathroom, saying “you keep saying the symbol on the door is a stick figure in a dress, but I look at it and see a stick figure in a cape, and so I entered because I’m super.”
It doesn’t matter what he sees. We as society have constructed that meaning. He knows it and is just an asshole. If he wants to change that meaning, he has to convince others to adopt that meaning and not just do what he wants.
This has nothing to do with the death of the author or post modernism, but people who get all twisted about have been saying this for sixty years now. Here’s a thirty year old example of missing the point.
I came here for hilarious answers, not an informative discussion about the meaning of “death if the author” damn it!
Just a nitpick. Death of the author states that any interpretation that can be backed up with the text is valid. Notice that two valid interpretations are not necessarily equal interpretations.
So no, it does not mean that any interpretation is valid, much less any interpretation is as good as any other.
This is the best explanation of “death of the author” I’ve heard:
Suppose I make a shopping list for my wife to go to the store. But the reason I make the list is to get her out of the house so I can sext with my paramour. Before anyone else sees the list, I’m hit by a bus and killed.
Now, the authorial intent is to get my wife out of the house. But that meaning is completely lost upon my death. Sure, you can go to the store and follow the list, but you can never decipher my intentions from the text.
As media criticism, “death of the author” depreciates “authorial intent” as less than useful and instead of doing a biography of the author to understand the work, you simply focus on the test and only the text.
Wagner was a Nazi before there were Nazis tho
It’s also commonly used the other way around: whatever the artist believed does not invalidate the art. For example, if Beethoven had been a Nazi, it wouldn’t take away from his work.
It’s an interesting question in a lot of ways, and I think it’s a spectrum and there’s no absolute answer. For example, does Kevin Spacey’s off screen behavior invalidate his work in The Usual Suspects? On the other hand, it’s clear that Ayn Rand’s beliefs are clearly expressed in Atlas Shrugged, and it’s easy to see the expression of (some) directors’ politics, or perversions, in the films they make; at what point does it stop being art and become propaganda, such as Triumph of the Will?
Those are all interesting questions that, like you said, generally do not admit clear answers.
For art, maybe there is a related question. Should analysis of an art piece (be it text, music, visual, etc.) also analyze the artist, or, put another way, is understanding the artist important to understanding their art? I, personally, like to say that the artist, in general, usually distracts from the art. But this is in many cases untrue.
if Beethoven had been a Nazi, it wouldn’t take away from his work.
It would have made him more impressive in my eyes, as he would have had to have been able to see the future, or time travel!
Which is the why of picking Beethoven rather than a contemporary or post-WWII artist: so as to not digress into an uninteresting debate about whether Hitler liked Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite (which he was, among other things). I tried for a relatively uncontroversial figure with no relation to Naziism by sheer fact of predating the movement and no other association.
