>. . . there is this 1992 still interesting commentary
>which is worth reading by Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author:
>Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, and I would
>like to point out also this other study which was published in Cambridge in
>1995, within the Volume VIII of the History of Literary Criticism (From
>Formalism to Poststructuralism): the pages of interest are 166-196. The
>author is Richard Rorty.
Since I neither have access to an academic
library nor have these myself I can't refer to
them, Erminia.
>
>For an interesting analysis of Barthes's idea of literariness, see also
>his letter to Jakobson (actually a letter-essay), where he suggests a
>coincidence of phonic properties of a word with its signifying function.
Is this reprinted in one of his collections of
essays? I can go try to hunt them out if you give
me a title.
>But theoretical use of language about
>language, that is metalanguage, is poetry at its highest, poetry that
>criticizes itself and its powers. As in the case of Cavalcanti's 'Donna me
>prega.'
Are you suggesting that poetry which isn't
explicitly self-referential is necessarily
somehow deficient? This strikes me as a very
perilous generalization. (In fact most
generalizations about poetry strike me as highly
dodgy.) Anyhow, you seem to imply that
metalinguistic usage is in itself enough to
produce 'poetry at its highest' (whatever that
might be), which is certainly untrue in my
experience; some of the most turgid stuff I've
encountered in contemporary poetry seems to
labour under precisely this impression. And have
you sufficient familiarity with poetry in other
languages to justify so sweeping a judgement?
What about Du Fu? Basho? Daibhi O Bruadair?
Homer? The world's traditions of 'folk poetry'?
>Decentred meanings are those the author may have implied or willingly
>decentred, transcended or sunk lost powers. The conscious, the public
>personae, centre of the authorial intention is dialectically intertwined
>with the reader’s interpretations, but at what actual level and surface? At
>Lacan’s subconscious>? At Foucault’s lack of centre/s? At Barthes ‘s and
>Kristeva’s endless play of signifiers? So, here you have poetry and theory
>coming together, as I was hoping to how in my previous message. Barthes
>himself being the true exponent of this trans-threshold. It means that an
>author is not one. It has intention but it is not a one-minded intention.
Who needs Barthes? Wasn't there a guy called
Rimbaud? And Lautreamont? And what (as I
suggested before) about Finnegans Wake? Or
Dogen's Shobogenzo?
Okay, I'm using a scattergun, perhaps, but what I
see is theorists explicitating what's already
'there' in many literary texts. I don't deny the
usefulness of theory, particularly in its
occasional role as prescribing new challenges for
practicioners (as with Galileo's father's group
and the origins of Opera, or the Confucian
theorists and the birth of Old-Style Verse in
China), but I *do* take issue with theory's being
credited with what it has merely described as
already achieved in practice.
>The Author ids a monster with thousand heads. Texts are always intertexts.
>Always> Who places the intention and who disperses it? All happens within
>the one polysemic thing (which is by definition One, Everybody, and None)
>then? The wawing tree the one mind, the neo-plotinian concurrence of the
>many in the One? The neo-Plotinian idea of emanation is postmodernity,
>after all>? The multiplicity in the one polymorphic mind is no mind? ‘All
>question for the ghost of Yeats.’ Is this what Yeats wanted to say>?
I'm glad Robin queried you on the issue of the
'neo-Plotinian'. But if 'texts are always
intertexts', as I agree, what's the big deal?
Trevor
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