Author’s Being and Death: from Ancient Times to Postmodernism

Author:

Khikhlushko BohdanORCID

Abstract

The article examines the concepts of “author” and “authorship” in literature in terms of his birth, evolution, decline, and return. The problem of authorship in literary studies is related to the question of approaches to textual research: should we pay attention to the author’s personality, what place does the author occupy in the author-text-reader relationship, and is it possible to completely abandon the author in favour of the reader or the text? The subject of the study is the concept of “author” in literature in the context of the historical development of the phenomenon of authorship. The purpose of the study is an attempt to comprehensively analyse the phenomenon of authorship, its evolution, and to compare different theories and approaches to the study of literary authorship. Anglo-American literary critics (E. Bennett, S. Burke, and J. Frow), considering the issue of authorship, include in their searches the early epochs – Antiquity and the Middle Ages, where there were proto-models of authorship. The figure of the author as an independent creator whose ideas are presented in his literary work wereconsolidated in the Modern period. This was facilitated, in particular, by the invention of printing and copyright. In Romanticism, the concept of “author” is more developed. Here, the author appears as a carrier of original ideas, and the literary work is a real reflection of his thoughts and inspiration. The development of modernism is undergoing dramatic changes. In the twentieth century, representatives of the formal school of literary criticism, the new criticism, determined that a work cannot be explained solely by the author’s personality. Besides, the focus was on the text and later on the reader. The works of R. Barth and M. Foucault reached their apogee without author-centered approach in the 1960s. At the end of the century, literary critics resumed an active discussion about the place of the author, considering the “death of the author” to be too radical. The study uses the historical method to trace the evolution of the phenomenon of authorship, the comparative method to help establish logical connections between different theories, and the method of analysis. In the course of the study, the author identifies the periods of development of authorship and the specific features inherent in each of them. In particular, the author identifies the characteristic features of authorship in the ancient era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. An important element of the work is the establishment of relationships between different theories of authorship in the twentieth century, where there is a struggle with traditional ideas about the author. Based on the research of S. Burke, it is determined that the transition from author to text and reader was carried out gradually during the first half of the twentieth century. The “death of the author” was the result of the work of many literary schools, and R. Barthes summarized it in a rather radical form. The author’s rapid return to the discourse is due to the impossibility of solving the issue of text interpretation by completely ignoring the author, in particular the peculiarities of his individual style. The novelty of the work lies in an attempt to take a global historical view of the problem of authorship, since authorship is more often discussed in the context of the twentieth century. The obtained results will help to better understand the reasons for the decline of the phenomenon of authorship and its revival, as well as to understand the variability of approaches in the study of literary texts.

Publisher

Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

Subject

General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Environmental Science

Reference24 articles.

1. Adorno, T. (2002). Teoriia estetyky. V-vo Solomii Pavlychko "Osnovy" [in Ukrainian].

2. Balzac, H. de. (1981). Peredmova do "Liudskoi komedii". In H. de Balzac. Dumky pro mystetstvo (pp. 33-44). Kyiv: Mystetstvo [in Ukrainian].

3. Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text (pp. 142-148), London: Fontana [in English].

4. Bennett, A. (2005). The Author. London & New York: Routledge [in English].

5. Burke, S. (1992). The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [in English].

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3