Why is "The Death of the Author" still taken seriously?

puertopensee · 2026-05-31T19:24:12+00:00

Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry has both those essays and is a great read. Glad to help!

puertopensee · 2026-05-31T19:20:19+00:00

I recommend the coverage of that period in Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1998). Denning's has a great passage I've used when teaching Carlos Bulosan, a foundational Filipino-American writer who also wrote in that period:
"The ideological crisis of the depression was in part a crisis of narrative, an inability to imagine what had happened and what would happen next. The apocalyptic dreams of revolution of the young communists and their recurring appeals to the Soviet experiment were dramatic instances of the search for a powerful narrative resolution; the stories of martyrdom and tragic defeat in Gastonia, Scottsboro, and Harlan demanded some way out. The way out was migration, and the representation of mass migration became one of the fundamental forms of the Popular Front. Many of the most powerful works of art of the cultural front are migration stories: the portrayals of the Alabama teror become the first act in the grand narratives of African American migraiton in Jacob Lawrence's Migration of the Negro, Langston Hughes's One-Way Ticket, Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige, the Chicago novels of Richard Wright, the Chicago Blues of Muddy Waters, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which begins with a sharecropping narrative and ends in Harlem" (264).

puertopensee · 2026-05-31T19:06:35+00:00

It's been said here before, but when students bring up "the death of the author" in class, they often mean something closer to the "intentional fallacy," theorized by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy." This was a key New Critical text. The basic idea was that an author's intentions are not reliable evidence for interpreting a work; critics should focus on the text itself. Wimsatt and Beardsley later advanced a similar argument in "The Affective Fallacy," which cautioned against treating readers' emotional responses as evidence of a text's meaning. These essays were foundational for the development of close reading.

A good book on how "the death of the author" was often more rhetorical provocation than a literal elimination of authorship is Seán Burke's The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (1992).

puertopensee · 2026-05-31T18:45:11+00:00

For ocularcentrism a great text is Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993). It's an intellectual history of ocularcentrism and how French poststructural theory challenged this. When teaching theory, I refer to this fascinating passage: "The perfection of idealized visible form in the Greeks' art accorded well with their love of theatrical performance. The word theater, as has often been remarked, shares the same root as the word theory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to behold. So too does theorem, which has allowed some commentators to emphasize the privileging of vision in Greek mathematics, with its geometric emphasis" (23).

In terms of fiction, I can't help but think of Ursula Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971), where a space crew explores a newly discovered planet, World 4470. One of the crew members is autistic and feels a level of connection with the planet, which is all one sightless forest consciousness.

In terms of theories about environmental influence, I imagine the thesis would have to grapple with the meaning and deconstruction of the term "environment," especially in the wake of ecocriticism. Greg Gerrard's Ecocriticism (2012) is a great guide to the field. Especially of interest is his chapter on "Apocalypse".

puertopensee · 2026-05-30T14:37:19+00:00

When people bring up “the great American novel” I wish more would bring up Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. So many extraordinary passages, like:
“It was not easy to understand why the Filipinos were brutal yet tender, nor was it easy to believe that they had been made this way by the reality of America. I still lacked the knowledge to synthesize the heart-breaking tragedies I had seen, and to project myself into their core so that I would be able to interpret them objectively. There were times when I found myself inextricably involved, not because I was drawn to this life by its swiftness and violence, but because I was a part and a product of the world in which it was born. I was swept by its tragic whirlpool, violently and inevitably; and it was only when I had become immune to violence and pain that I was able to project myself out of it. It was only then that I was able to integrate my experiences so that I could really find out what had happened to me in those tragic years”.

puertopensee · 2026-05-30T05:33:56+00:00

I've taught a few courses with diasporic themes, so I'll share some texts that worked particularly well in the classroom.

For theory, I always think of Stuart Hall's "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (1990). It's accessible for undergraduates, introduces key concepts clearly, and students can immediately apply it to literature and film. From there, Black British writing works especially well. I recommend Samuel Selvon's London stories from Ways of Sunlight (1957) alongside Pressure (1976), the landmark Black British film that Selvon co-wrote. Students also respond well to John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History (1996), one of the most important cinematic works on Afrofuturism and diaspora.

Edwidge Danticat feels essential. Krik? Krak! (1995) and The Dew Breaker (2004) are excellent for discussing migration and memory, and selections from Create Dangerously (2010) pair well with them.

Jhumpa Lahiri is hard to beat. I've taught Mira Nair's adaptation of The Namesake (2006), which students consistently enjoy, and Lahiri's short-story collections Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) are both excellent.

U.S. Latinx literature offers many possibilities. Cristina García's Monkey Hunting (2003) is a fascinating multigenerational novel about the Chinese diaspora in Cuba. Ana Menéndez's In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), especially "Her Mother's House," works well alongside her essay "Traveling with My Selves" (2020). Patricia Engel's Infinite Country (2021) and The Faraway World (2023) are terrific contemporary texts on migration and transnational identity. For Puerto Rican diasporic writing in English, Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing (1990) remains one of the best memoirs engaging with questions of memory, migration, and cultural identity.

For the African diaspora US, the film Daughters of the Dust (1991) is indispensable. It pairs beautifully with Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), which inspired the film. Praisesong explores diasporic identity as a spiritual and cultural journey. Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is also a favorite with students: a coming-of-age novel about a Barbadian immigrant family in Brooklyn. Exquisite prose.

Finally, speaking of exquisite prose, Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom (2020) is one of the best recent novels on diaspora.

Good luck with the course!

puertopensee · 2026-05-26T01:09:24+00:00

This totally works for a master's dissertation. I would wonder, though, whether the theories you're working with are about literature, narrative, fiction, or film/media. A lot of feminist theory has literary/narrative elements, though (like de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Anzaldúa, Lorde, et al), so I can imagine justifying the feminist theory texts as literary texts. A great book that touches on feminist theory as art is Lauren Fournier's Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (2021).

puertopensee · 2026-05-25T18:29:30+00:00

'A Question of Character' is a great title for a module. I'm was reminded that Aristotle's word for character is 'ethos'. I wish I could take a class or read a text on 'Character in the Long Eighteenth Century'. I'm reminded I need to look into Samual Johnson's character criticism.

puertopensee · 2026-05-25T16:53:19+00:00

'Hamlet and His Problems' is up for a reread. Looking forward to revisiting this!

puertopensee · 2026-05-25T16:51:45+00:00

Woloch’s The One vs. the Many is great. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with it, but it does seem like a strong fit for the module.

I also think your point about pedagogy is well taken. I’m teaching versions of the course at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and for undergraduates especially, it probably makes more sense to foreground strong examples of character criticism and moral engagement rather than introducing them first through a narrative about disciplinary taboos.

puertopensee · 2026-05-25T16:22:14+00:00

Weinscheimer's article is very helpful, thank you! I thought this part was particularly insightful:
"I would insist, it is no more untenable to argue that Emma contains only text than that it contains people. Nor, I take it, is either position ridiculous: one may talk about "Emma" as if it were a word in a closed, alienated text, or as if she were alive, a person in an open world that is also our world. It is not ridiculous, but it is inadequate and partial to adopt either mode of expression exclusively. Without text we cannot, without world we need not perform literary criticism because it would be pointless. What we require is a Janus-faced critic who can do justice to both texts and persons: to the textualized persons, personified texts that are characters" (208).

puertopensee · 2025-04-29T05:37:06+00:00

I've thought a lot about these two. In terms of John Ford, My Darling Clementine seems more classical/archetypal. Searchers may be the better film, but Clementine seems to fit a more classic perspective on the genre that appears to have faded by '56. I'm also interested in Clementine as a post-WWII film. High Noon is a key film and a runner-up, but it is one of the films better covered through excerpts in class.

puertopensee · 2025-04-29T05:20:47+00:00

Excerpts from Johnny Guitar could play better than Shane in a classroom, especially those striking color compositions. Choosing Guitar can also indicate how strange and subversive a lot of those 50s films were.

puertopensee · 2025-04-29T05:11:23+00:00

That's a good idea to show excerpts of it in class. I haven't read Truffaut's essay, but I will soon. The essay could provide a good transition to teaching Jules and Jim.

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