Authoresurrection

This page is under deconstruction. The photos to the left is of Roland Barthes who wrote an essay on literary criticism titled The Death of the Author.   CIgarettes may have played a part in the death of the critic. Barthes' assertion was that the writer could never be the final authority of a text because each reading brought a new mind capable of its own interpretation within his or her own context... or whatever context the reader might chose to place a text in its deconstruction.   This critical process reminds me of dissecting a creature preserved in formaldehyde without any reverence for the evolved, living creature that once inhabited the form. "The Author may be dead, but his ghosts maybe even more eloquent" (Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar. http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0226.html).                                         "Bring Out Your Authors!  Bring Out Your Authors!"

In The Rebirth of the Author, Nicholas Rombes resurrects the author:

"Roland Barthes's famous prediction about the death of the author has come to pass, but not because the author is nowhere, but rather because she is everywhere.

Indeed, the author has grown and multiplied in direct proportion to academic dismissals and denunciations of her presence; the more roundly and confidently the author has been dismissed as a myth, a construction, an act of bad faith, the more strongly she has emerged. The recent surge in personal websites and blogs -- rather than diluting the author concept -- has helped to create a tyrannical authorship presence, where the elevation of the personal and private to the public level has only compounded the cult of the author. We are all authors today. We are all auteurs. We are all writers. We are all filmmakers. And we are all theorists, because what we make theorizes itself."   http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=480

T.S. Eliot began the meme of "New Criticism" (in which the author was merely a cultural conduit for the text he composed, and not an agent of original creation) in his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent.

E.T. and Eliot have little to say about Barthes or the other Eliot, although Steven Spielberg used resurrection as a deus ex machina device in his movie.

          WHALE POEM by Adrian Henri

This poem moves at the deepest levels of the paper

majestic amongst minnows of words

filters shovelfuls of cliches through its subtle jaws

swallows whole vocabulariees.  Its voice

vibrates at deepest levels of the mind, where

phosphorescent eyes gleam through the murky darkness.

This poem will be dragged blind into daylight

strips of helpless flesh torn from it, boiled down

into precis, summaries, concordances.

The poem's last despairing cry

rumbles deep across the tundras of this page.