https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A
The point is that the audience is allowed to interpret the work in ways the author didn't intend, because the author's personal views and experiences were only one factor in how the art was formed, there was also earlier art that influenced them, and other people helping along the way, and if you're a Christian like me the possibility that the Holy Spirit was a factor is always there, I believe it does sometimes work through non-believers.
She talks briefly at the beginning about the "Ethics" of supporting art from artists who've said or done problematic things, but never really delved into that. Death of the Author is mostly irrelevant to my answer to that issue actually. The issue there is that "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" whether or not the "Author" of some art you spent money on is problematic I guarantee you someone making money off it is. So if you want to boycott a perfectly enjoyable piece of entertainment because you don't like the author fine, just don't go around shamming others for not doing the same, because we're supporting evil corporations just by buying the food we need to live. And for me simply enjoying the entertainment media I like is also important to how I survive living in this world.
I'm now gonna copy here a comment I left.
What annoys me is the notion that Death of the Author is some new thing and Authorial intent is what's traditional. Lots of traditional texts we don't even know who wrote them, sometimes we have a name and nothing more like Homer and Hesiod, it's entirely possible that Homer as he's traditionally thought of didn't even exist, there are conflicting theories even on when The Iliad was written down.
But regardless of all that the Traditional view of the Iliad was never that who Homer was mattered, he was always viewed as just a vehicle by which more ancient stories were past down.
The problem is it's actually a very modern idea to think of any text as having only one author. A Prose novel may not have collaborators in the same obvious way a Movie does, but it's known that Tolkien was constantly showing what he was working on to Lewis and vica versa. And that's the thing, Tolkien pretty much expressed the Death of the Author concept before the 1960s, he wanted his myths to be like real myths, he wanted people to read whatever they wanted to out of them.I know full well that C. S. Lewis wasn't ultimately in agreement with me on Universal Salvation, but I've gained a lot recently from interpreting his fiction as if they could be. And it's kinda the same with Tolkien.
The video is mainly about the impossibility of separating art from the author in the modern social media driven world, well even then it depends. Most of the Anime I consume I know nothing about the people who made it. A decent amount I've heard something about them, but even then I'm often skeptical of what I hear because of the nature of how news travels from east to west. And not once in the FranXX controversy did anyone even think about seeing if the authors had expressed any political views, no everyone decided what they thought the show's politics were from the text alone, and I didn't come to the same conclusion as most ani-tubers.
This reminds me of when I was reading about 19th Century French Pulp authors via Brian Stableford, how Alexandre Dumas was perceived as a royalist based on aspects of the content of his most famous stories even though he was staunchly a Republican.
Paul Feval was probably the Tolkien of the 19th Century even though he mostly didn't write in the same genre, because of how he was a Conservative Catholic who's fiction has a bizarre way of appealing to people who are clearly against his real world politics. The people at BlackCoatPress making his work available in modern English are clearly closer to Eugene Sue on the political spectrum, yet it was a Feval work they named their publishing company after. I don't know if his stuff can appeal to Protestants/Evangelicals like Ryan Reeves as well as Tolkien's does, but I know I'm broadly speaking an Evangelical and I'm a fan.
This is very interesting.
ReplyDeleteIm going to leave my thoughts here, after reading your post.
My problem with the common usage of the "death of the author" its that it misundertands, the actual usage of the death of the author.
Because the “death of the author” is not, as it is so very often misinterpreted and decontextualized, about the author’s disappearance. The death of the author is about the creator’s (the author’s) absorption into the art itself — the death of the author is really about the birth of the reader.
So everone is getting it wrong, additionally one of the most ironic thigs is as you said the death of the author is not new, so if we approach the book "the death of the author" by Roland Barthes and use"the Death of the author" on his own theory, one reader migth take issue with the idea of the essay that idea being, that the death of the author is not new, as Roland Barthes is proposing.
So its like a meta-irony happening in the essay that "First" (Not first) proposed the idea.
Aditioally i agree, that getting diferent cultures like Japan, its going to complicate the idea, s8nce if you want to see an authors ideas, you have to go through translations and news media, which is not the best way to get your information. So you probably are sceptical about it (Like you yourself said) the irony there is that you have to apply a similar "Death of the author" idea on the Translations and News Media to get to an sceptical version of the author you are searching.
Aditioally, it's actually not humanly possible to to that for every author, so if you watched 20 anime, for example, you migth only know the authors of the most popular for while the majority, you don't even know the authors name. (That's not even adding the fact that the author or his ideas migth, just, not want to be know) leaving you with your own interpretation.
Aditioally people use this theory for when an author does something bad, (for an example look to Inuyasha's author) but the problem is, what i tend to find, there, is that people make an strawman of the author, that doesn't even reflect whst actually happened, often exaggerating what's actual. Like calling the Inuyasha's author a "Padeofile" when he didn't even do what real "Padeofile" do. Im not going to even defend him, or what he did, that's not my intention here, i just picked him, so you can see what happens when the death of the author is appliedon someone that did a crime, people then exaggerated the reality often. Aditioally, then we must ask, does the crime, like is the crime reflected in The work of Inuyasha's?
And the answer is no.
Why?
Because I think, people can have different things in their head, often contradictory, which may or not be recognized or reflect in their works of art.
So what im trying to say here, is that the world is complex and people are complex, therefore authors are complex, and the death of the author migth be not that helpful, it might be a case by case scenario.
Which i think is what it actually is.