Ask Lemmy

Just a nitpick. Death of the author states that any interpretation that can be backed up with the text is valid. Notice that two valid interpretations are not necessarily equal interpretations.

So no, it does not mean that any interpretation is valid, much less any interpretation is as good as any other.

This is the best explanation of "death of the author" I've heard:

Suppose I make a shopping list for my wife to go to the store. But the reason I make the list is to get her out of the house so I can sext with my paramour. Before anyone else sees the list, I'm hit by a bus and killed.

Now, the authorial intent is to get my wife out of the house. But that meaning is completely lost upon my death. Sure, you can go to the store and follow the list, but you can never decipher my intentions from the text.

As media criticism, "death of the author" depreciates "authorial intent" as less than useful and instead of doing a biography of the author to understand the work, you simply focus on the test and only the text.

It doesn't matter what he sees. We as society have constructed that meaning. He knows it and is just an asshole. If he wants to change that meaning, he has to convince others to adopt that meaning and not just do what he wants.

This has nothing to do with the death of the author or post modernism, but people who get all twisted about have been saying this for sixty years now. Here's a thirty year old example of missing the point.

I came here for hilarious answers, not an informative discussion about the meaning of "death if the author" damn it!

It's also commonly used the other way around: whatever the artist believed does not invalidate the art. For example, if Beethoven had been a Nazi, it wouldn't take away from his work.

It's an interesting question in a lot of ways, and I think it's a spectrum and there's no absolute answer. For example, does Kevin Spacey's off screen behavior invalidate his work in The Usual Suspects? On the other hand, it's clear that Ayn Rand's beliefs are clearly expressed in Atlas Shrugged, and it's easy to see the expression of (some) directors' politics, or perversions, in the films they make; at what point does it stop being art and become propaganda, such as Triumph of the Will?