The Death and Resurrection of the Author

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The nature of authorship and the place of authorial intention in the interpretation of literary texts are examined in this dialogical collection. Have the reports of the author's death been greatly exaggerated When Roland Barthes famously announced the "death of the author," he heralded a major new debate in modern literary criticism and aesthetics. This volume is a dialogical collection of key essays discussing the nature of authorship and the place, if any, of authorial intention in the interpretation of literary texts. Including seminal essays by Barthes and Foucault, along with other previously published and newly commissioned contributions, this collection examines the philosophical underpinnings and arguments of both sides of the debate.

Reviews

"Irwin's collection includes provocative contributions by both analytic and continental thinkers to two of the central aspects of current debate--namely, the death of the author and the nature and function of author constructs. Irwin's collection may well force us to refocus the current debate in a more fruitful manner, and perhaps even to rethink the notion of intentionality itself."-Jeff Mitscherling Department of Philosophy University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
"Long after movements like deconstruction and post-modernism have faded from the forefront, literary critics and readers generally will feel the urgency of defining a position in regard to questions of authorial intention. From psychoanalysis to feminism, from New Criticism to cultural studies, some version of the question of who is doing the writing is at the center of 20th-century literary studies. This handsome collection of essays is at once itself a set of great landmarks and a Baedeker for 21st-century readers negotiating their way among author functions hidden, implied, real, unconscious, historically determined, disappeared in to the text, or effaced into the fabric of the culture itself."-Leslie Brisman Karl Young Professor of English Yale University

Author Bio

WILLIAM IRWIN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at King's College, Pennsylvania./e He has published several articles on theory of interpretation and aesthetics, as well as four books, including Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Greenwood, 1999).