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Narratives: Stories and Structures
[Crossposted from CEMP] Notes from the second keynote in the Narratives series. Post comments or use the forum if you want to clarify anything! Here’s last week’s introductory lecture. TL;DR? This week’s shoutometer – or suggest next week’s – or even write a story based on one of George Polti’s 36 situations.
We see the whole structure, and the man in the tree. We can see structure, but not texture. The man in the tree sees the texture of the tree, he is in close and intimate. But the man in the tree cannot see the whole structure of the tree, unless he leaves the tree. We cannot be in the tree and outside it at the same time. We can’t see texture and structure at the same time.
Is structure all-important?
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – here’s an interesting project which takles Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and allows anyone to upload video clips as alternatives to Vertov’s original. A new ‘remake’ is made using software and the database of clips that people upload.
The project is very tightly structured around each shot from the film. In theory, the original and the remake should be structurally identical. So does this mean that the two films are the same?
Structuralism
The Stories and Structures lecture focussed on structuralism. Structuralism is the movement in intellectual thought which developed over the course of the C20th, mostly out of the work of Russian formalists like Vladimir Propp and the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure’s structuralist approach to linguistics led to what we now call semiotics, and is the study of the internal structure of language. He called a synchronic snapshot of language ‘langue’ and distinguished it from ‘parole’ – the diachronic utterances which ‘langue’ facilitates.
‘Langue’ is relationally structured and it is this relational structure which allows words to ‘have’ meaning. Every word is in a paradigmatic relation to every other word, and these paradigmatic relationships enable and define difference and meaning – different words, different meanings… This sounds complicated, but isn’t really: if we had only one word, we could only ‘mean’ one thing. We have lots of different words, and differences between them (the relational structure) are what create meaning.
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss was the main player in this lecture. Levi-Strauss did to mythologies what Saussure did to language: looked for a relational structure in the myths and legends of various cultures. In his essay, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Levi-Strauss analyses the Oedipal myth. Interestingly, he emphasises that he feels free to take many different instances of the myth from throughout the ages, and combine them into the material to be analysed.
So Levi-Strauss’ snapshot of the mythic narrative is synchronic like Saussure’s analysis of language, but not in the sense that he examines a myth at one moment in time, but rather that he treats the entire myth as a system which can be laid out at a moment in time and surveyed as a paradigmatically and syntagmatically relational structure. He does exactly this, in the form of a table-like grid, into which he places the key components – or mythemes – of the story. He repeats this system in other works, such as those which treat native american myth systems. Again, his synchronic ‘snapshot’ of myth is not confined to one story, but to the entire collection of stories which a particular culture keeps in circulation.
The primary tool Levi-Strauss uses to define the components, the mythemes, which go into his table, are ‘binary oppositions’.
Binary oppositions
One of the keys to understanding structuralism is the notion of ‘dyads’ or ‘binary oppositions’. It may help to think of binary oppositions as fundamental categories of human thought. If we are born into a world of undifferentiated chaos (babies have to learn to make sense of the kaleidoscope of sensory information that bombards them from the moment of birth), then the development of mind in a human being must involve categorisation. In order to define something, you must also define what it is not. Every new definition can be further split into yet more categories, ad pretty much infinitum.
In the lecture I compared this to mitosis. For those of you yearning for more philosophical insight, if human analysis is rather like a knife, which differentiates the world into conceptually different things, then this is what we might call the origins of ‘dialectic’.
So anyway, pairs of such categories might include:
- Raw / cooked
- Friend / foe
- Kin / not kin
- Self / other
These binary oppositions tend to get paired up with another binary opposition:
- Good / bad
So raw is bad, cooked is good (if you don’t want to die of food poisoning); kin is good if you want people to co-operate with; but kin is bad when you want to reproduce and make healthy babies.
The structural law of myth
In the essay on the Oedipal myth, Levi-Strauss laments that various accidents in the field of anthropology have led to the undermining of prospects for the ‘scientific study of religion’. He goes on to say that analysing the instances of the Oedipal myth, what is aimed for is a ‘logical treatment of the whole’ that will lead to uncovering the ‘structural law of the myth’.
These descriptions of his programme start to outline one key aspect of what structuralists want to do: approach the object of their study scientifically. Levi-Strauss emphasises this by noting that when poetry is translated from one language to another, serious distortions of the original poem occur, but translations of myths do not suffer in the same way. He describes myth as ‘timeless’, and as something that functions at a ‘high level’, which ‘takes off’ from language. These are characteristics which make myths translatable, reproducible: they have ‘constituent units’ which are governed by laws in just the same way that particles have laws which are governed by the laws of physics.
Roland Barthes say something very similar in his essay, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ when he describes narrative as ‘international, transhistorical, transcultural’ – he even uses the U-word: ‘universal’.
Reductionist approaches to human culture
The logical conclusion of the emphasis on structural units which are universal, reproducible, predictable, translatable, international, transhistorical and transcultural is to to take a reductionist approach to human culture (see the notes on structure and texture from the last lecture). Indeed, it is the inevitable consequence of adopting a scientific method at all, which is certainly what structuralism attempts.
A classic method of structuralist anthropology, for instance, is to identify the ‘component units’ of human behaviour which can be observed in every known human culture. These include the telling of stories, taboos on incest, music, co-operation, war and hundreds of other ‘universals’.
This inevitably raises questions about human nature itself: if all human societies have wars, then is war a ‘natural’ trait of humans, etc? In some senses these questions are really very useful and we can the pursuit of knowledge addressing difficult ethical issues. However, we might also want to make some pretty severe criticisms of such ‘universalist’ approaches to human nature. It is one thing to link incest taboos to biological imperatives. It is another to impose ‘laws’ on human society because of particular interpretations of narratives such as religion and myth.
Scientism and Marxism
We will return to deal with Marxism and criticisms of scientism in future lectures. For the purposes of this lecture, we simply note that Marxists such as Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School regarded scientific, universalist approaches to culture as tyrannical; there are many ways in which we can note that rationalism contains self-contradictory problems (do something as simple as look for the square root of 2 and you have found what is called an ‘irrational’ number). But we end up confronted by a ‘representational fallacy’ – we can think that we are dealing with concrete reality, when in fact we are dealing with nothing more than mist conjured by our imagination: language, story, myth, narrative.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOkay
So much for the theoretical matters we were trying to nail down. We also tried to illustrate them. First of all, let’s think about Memento (Nolan, 2000). SPOILER ALERT!!! This film illustrates the difference between story and plot rather well. If someone asked you ‘what happens in Memento‘, you could well give two very different answers, both equally correct.
One of these is the story – the chronological story in which Leonard Shelby is an insurance claim investigator, whose wife is raped and murdered, and who ends up with anterograde amnesia, and repeatedly seeks out vengeance by tracking down and killing people called John G – either because other people set him up to kill them for their own purposes (Teddy setting Lenny up to kill Jimmy), or because Lenny himself sets himself up to kill them out of spite (killing John ‘Teddy’ Gammel) because that is better than admitting that he has become ‘no-one’, with nothing to live for.
The other answer is the plot – what we ‘experience’ as we watch the film. Lenny Shelby kills a man, and we gradually learn through a series of flashbacks that Lenny is seeking to avenge his murdered wife. We learn that he uses tattoos and polaroid photographs to keep a record of what he knows, so that he can piece his life back together every time he ‘wakes’ into a present with no context. He stresses that he goes on ‘facts’ – but as each scene unfolds, our trust in Lenny’s ability to record facts erodes, until we realise that the so-called facts that he uses to direct his actions are actually little more than the subjective expressions of momentary emotions (such as his trust of Natalie) or even the result of his own malice (his mistrust and murder of Teddy). In the final scene of the film, we discover not only that Lenny has killed at least two ‘John Gs’ before killing Teddy, but we are also provoked into worrying that the entire ‘story’ we have just witnessed may have been an entire fabrication: that Lenny is in fact, Sammy Jankis; that he unwittingly killed his wife using repeated insulin injections; and that he, not Sammy Jankis, has been institutionalised, and that we may be watching nothing more than a phantasm, a momentary hallucination.
Structuralism vs formalism
Structure and form sound like very similar things. In some contexts, they can even mean the same things. But they are quite different things when it comes to narrative theory, so let’s try to pull them apart a little.
I suggested a massive simplification here, which we may use provisionally to better understand structuralism and formalism. Let us think of structuralism as interested in story, the totality of the diegesis. Formalism on the other hand is interested in plot – the framing devices through which we learn the story.
I emphasise that this is an exaggerated simplification, simply to help us get the idea.
So structuralism wants to map out the whole of the diegetic story – the fabula, rather than the sjuzet, and understand its structure. Story can be plotted in many different ways, and this need not alter the story. Levi-Strauss even says that we can use the many different instances of the Oedipal myths together to understand its ‘laws’.
So to the extent that this simplification is useful, formalism is interested in the artifice of representation – that is the devices that we use to tell these stories – the form they take (which is quite different from the ‘structure’ of the story). We’ll be placing our emphasis more on formalism in the next lecture.
Analysing stories
We created an example of a story by using a fairly common structure which we then dressed in the texture of your own narratives. The structure took the form: a protagonist; who encounters and obstacle; then overcomes the obstacle; and there is a positive outcome. Your stories looked like this:
A science teacher is trying to teach a class. A monster enters the class and makes teaching rather difficult. The teacher destroys the monster using their well-established and well-founded scientific principles and understanding. And the class can continue as normal.
A penguin wants to go into the sea. Unfortunately there is an apple in the way. So the penguin kicks the apple, which skittles away, leaving the way open for the penguin to get to the sea.
A student has crippling dyslexia; he is helped by his teacher, enabling him to write a novel which makes his fortune and he becomes extremely rich.
An alcoholic cowboy wants to drink himself to death. He walks out of a bar, and encounters someone who gets in his way. He shoots them, and is able to carry on his way, and drink himself to death.
All of these stories can be expressed in terms of a simple binary opposition: complete / incomplete. The teacher is incomplete, because he is unable to fulfil their role of teacher; destroying the monster allows them to perform their role, thus achieving ‘completeness’. The penguin wants to feed in its natural milieu, but is unable to do so – it is incomplete; it achieves completeness by kicking the apple and getting to the water. The student is incomplete, because he is unable to write his novel; the teacher’s help complete him, by allowing him to fulfil his dream. The alcoholic cowboy is incomplete because he desires to kill himself, but his way is barred; being free to do so makes him complete.
Being able to see stories in this way gives us a way to analyse structure of the narrative. Sometimes it is very easy, as in Hollywood blockbusters, when there are easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. Such obviously binary structures are Manichean, as was George Bush’s famous line, ‘you’re either with us or against us’.
Limits of structure
While these structuralist ideas are undoubtedly appealing and powerful in many ways, they also have shortcomings. We will return to how structuralism becomes post-structuralism in the final lecture of the series.
For now I just want to think about how Memento parallels the rational approach to making sense of the world that structuralism attempts. We watch Lenny relying on things that seem to be very clearly facts. Polaroids document facts. Lenny tattoos ‘facts’ on his body, and as we begin our journey with him, we trust him – we feel sure he must be a just avenger of his wife’s murderer. But this fact-based approach deteriorates into wilful self-deception.
In fact, it we can even read Memento as having no story at all: the chronological story we witnessed becomes indeterminate, as we see one event multiple times (such as Lenny pinching his wife leg, but later the same event is shown as Lenny injecting his wife’s leg with insulin). What we thought was the internally coherent diegesis of Memento is really a hall of mirrors, where we cannot be sure that anything we have seen is not an illusion, a hallucination. Memento has become pure plot – a trick or an artifice, an illusion created through the device of story-telling.
Next time
Next time in Narratives, we’ll turn to formalism, and examine the artifice of plot. We’ll take in some Marxism, and we’ll also consider mimesis.
Invitation to a structuralist experiment
George Polti described 36 dramatic situations. If we write lots of stories based on the situations, we can analyse them to see if the structuralists are right. Here’s a website where you can add a story based on any of the 36 situations. We’ll look at the stories there ate the end of teh Narratives series and see what sort of conclusions we can draw…
Too long; didn’t read
An important school of theoretical thought in the C20th wanted to systematise cultural study. This was the structuralist movement, and it aimed at adopting a scientific approach to the analysis of myths, narratives and language.
Structuralism has some strengths and some weaknesses: narratives certainly have internal structures, and structuralism certainly helps us to understand how language works; however, whether it is a good idea to think of narrative structures as producing ‘universal’ human laws is a different question entirely.
- write a story based on the 36 situations
- the bibliography for today’s lecture
- the discussion forum for any questions
The Transitive Author
Imported from Menticulture
I've had (this isn't meant to sound as confessional as it does) Roland Barthes on my mind recently. Earlier in the year a student quoted some of him at me in an essay, and I'm afraid I don't think they really grappled with the sense of the text (note I'm not saying they 'interpreted it incorrectly'!) - it was more of a quote-shoe-in to tick the theory box. But the quote - a line I've often glanced over and left behind as I engage in the tmesis of excavating a Barthes text - has kept coming back to me in the form of the question I wrote on the student's paper - 'What do you think Barthes is getting at here?'
The Transitive Author
Imported from Menticulture
I've had (this isn't meant to sound as confessional as it does) Roland Barthes on my mind recently. Earlier in the year a student quoted some of him at me in an essay, and I'm afraid I don't think they really grappled with the sense of the text (note I'm not saying they 'interpreted it incorrectly'!) - it was more of a quote-shoe-in to tick the theory box. But the quote - a line I've often glanced over and left behind as I engage in the tmesis of excavating a Barthes text - has kept coming back to me in the form of the question I wrote on the student's paper - 'What do you think Barthes is getting at here?'
The Writerly Text: Part 1
This lecture is an exploration of the notion of the ‘writerly text’. The readerly and writerly texts were proposed by Roland Barthes – a critic and theorist who was concerned – as have we in the first few weeks of the course – with understanding the semiological basis of how communication works, and the role ideology (Barthes might say ‘mythology’) plays in the circulation and construction of meaning.
Expertise
We began by thinking about expertise. Here’s one of my favourite slides, a photograph by Leo Reynolds:
I challenged you by arguing that, since I’m an expert in a particular field (being a lecturer in a university presumably denotes my expertise), then what I have to say about that field is better, and more important, than what you, as students, might have to say. And of course, year after year, albeit with some reservations, you agree, instead of telling me to go screw myself. After all, why else would you pay fees?
So that’s me, there, at the front of the evolutionary curve with my mortarboard, standing at my lecturn. And in the lecture you mostly placed yourselves a bit further back in the queue, no longer monkey-like, having managed to stand up straight, but not yet qualified to hold forth at the lecturn. It is a wonder of our educational system that we manage to encourage such submission and servitude in our young people.
Preferred readings
What experts do is to produce preferred readings – sometimes called ‘dominant readings’. Here’s a picture produced by Badoak for the last unit, Images:
We asked Badoak to restrain any urges to tell us what he was trying to communicate with this image while we tried to analyse it ourselves. We had a variety of responses – it produced many different ‘readings’. I proposed a reading – that the image has a narrative arc which moves as it were from bottom to top: bird tracks at the bottom are mimicked by artificial, but otherwise meaningless marks, but as we look higher up the image, we see these marks begin to appear coherent, recognisable as human symbols; right in the top corner, we see 0s and 1s – binary notation. All the way up the picture, these ‘symbols’ are accompanied by human footprints – indexical signs of human presence. The image thereby communicates a narrative about human beings, their development of complexity over their evolution: the closeness to – and yet the ‘alienness’ from – nature, that human culture and technology embody. It is a story of eons within a few centimetres.
Badoak confirmed that this reading was what he was trying to achieve: so the author’s intention in this image was susceptible to interpretation by an informed reader. I found and identified the dominant reading of this image. This dominant reading was not universally shared amongst all of us though. Badoak confirmed that this was not disappointing – an author may not wish to be obvious, he might prefer for some work to be necessary to uncover dominant readings – after all without work, where is the art? The work of interpretation is what informed experts do.
Expert analysis
The expert might expound at length on the ways in which this image ‘produces’ meaning: it uses various signs, which in semiotic terms are indeces, icons and symbols: the footprints and bird-tracks are indexical – signs which are direct evidence of the ‘signified’; the artificial, mimicked marks which resemble the bird-tracks, but which are clearly copies, rather than indices, are iconic signs – they resemble the bird-tracks, and signify birds only to the extent that the mimickry has some kind of fidelity; and finally, the heiroglyphic and binary notation are symbolic signs – they signify things human beings recognise only because we have somehow grown to share understanding of these signs through custom and convention. Symbolic signs are arbitrary – which is to say that they ‘have meaning’ only through convention, not through physical relationship or resemblence.
Note, though, that we do not need to understand what the heiroglyphs and binary notation mean: this image plays on the connotations they carry, rather than what they denote; we do not know, or very much care, which words or numbers are represented here – rather they stand for something else – the very complexity of symbolic meaning which human beings utilise – so this image harnesses not only semiotic signs, but ‘figures of speech’ too: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – symbolic representations of how humans think. The binary ‘stands for’ advanced civilsation; the footprints ‘stand for’ the constant presence of human beings throughout the chronological story of the image. The image, in fact, is highly reflexive, since it uses signs to signify something about the very signs themselves. The co-evolution of the human and the sign are examined in the only way humans can examine them – through signs.
The expert utilises these specialised examples of vocabulary (sign, signifier, signified, index, icon, symbol, connotation, denotation, reflexivity, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche) in order to more precisely provide evidence for the preferred, or dominant reading; we need only to throw in ‘genre’ and ‘juxtaposition’ and we might have a whole academic essay on our hands.
Red Riding Hood
Let’s look at another example of an image. Prior to this lecture, you explored how to adapt the fairy-tale of Little Red Riding Hood by using other adaptations as a starting point. In the lecture we looked at this image, Little Red Riding Hood by John Wehr:
Some of you adapted the story based on this image as Red Riding Hoodie – a (carnivalesque!) inversion of the story, where Red Riding Hood is a dangerous, disaffected youth, and the wolf had better watch out. How is it that you were able to create such a subversive interpretation of the story? Where has the dominant reading in this image gone?
Look at the construction of the image: we assume it is night; is the face lit by a streetlamp? Look at the cropping: is Red Riding Hood moving? what is he looking at? what is he thinking? what is off-shot? These contextual necessities are absent, and so the meanings we want to ascribe in this image are absent – left to our imagination. The inscrutability of this youth’s face is just the starting point for constructing meanings – and the expert can use all the vocabulary they like, but cannot identify a dominant reading.
These imposed meanings – in this case the hoodie – come from somewhere in our imaginations, and are informed by our ideological concerns. What is a hoodie, with all its connotations, if not an idea we circulate, attaching implications to it as it goes? Where do those implications come from? Those implications are just snippets of our ideological hinterland which inform how we interpret the world.
Seeds of meaning
Here’s a famous phrase:
CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME
In the session, some of the resonances or meanings we coaxed from this phrase, on its own, included the archaic spelling of ‘child’ and the syntax (verb at the end of the sentence) which implied a kind of poetic discourse. The ‘dark tower’ connoted a sense of the Gothic, perhaps. These ‘hooks’ or ‘clues’ start to push us towards constructing or imagining possible stories, forms and genres which we might generate from this short phrase.
In fact, it is a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear, a fragment spoken by Edgar who is disguised as mad Tom. From this fragment, Robert Browning later constructed a poem in 1855 – from just a tiny fragment of meaning, Browning was inspired to write an allegory of knightly quest. From a few ‘seeds’ the creative imagination produces and transforms meaning.
Or consider this fragment:
COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY
We identified paradoxes and oxymorons here – mutually exclusive words joined together. The sentence is grammatically and syntactically correct, but implies nonsense, impossibility and paradox.
Actually, this phrase was used as an example by Noam Chomsky as part of his exploration of the relationship between language and human nature, and as an illustration of how meaning is created through more than simply grammar or syntax, since we can create syntactically correct sentences which are literally meaningless. (Incidentally, though not of direct relevance here, Chomsky argues that the ability to create syntactical structures necessary for language are hard-wired into human biology – a view shared to some extent by anthropological psychologist Steven Pinker).
Having seen Chomsky’s example, some people considered it as a throwing down of the gauntlet, and set about creating texts in which such a sentence, apparently absent of any possible meaning, would actually make sense. Here’s one of their efforts:
Behold the pent-up power of the winter tree;
Leafless it stands, in lifeless slumber.
Yet its very resting is revival and renewal:
Inside the dark gnarled world of trunk and roots,
Cradled in the chemistry of cell and sap,
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
In deep and dedicated doormancy,
Concentrating, conserving, constructing:
Knowing, by some ancient quantum law
Of chlorophyll and sun
That come the sudden surge of spring,
Dreams become reality, and ideas action.Bryan O. Wright
See this archived thread
to see a few more examples of how people explored the prompts of their imaginations, fed with just an apparently dry and meaningless piece of academic cruft.
The instability of meaning
These examples illustrate how, when given the opportunity, the human imagination expresses enormous creativity. The power of the imagination allows us to create and produce meanings, which are simply not present, or intended, by an author. Meaning is not stable and fixed, it is produced, created and constructed, and it mutates under the pressure of usage by creative human imaginations. Indeed, reading any kind of text, whether this text you read now, or fragments of text such as Chomsky’s nonsense phrase, is not a passive, but an active activity.
Barthes’ Death of the Author
So: we must re-examine the relationship between reader and author: what an author ‘intends’, the meaning that we might call the ‘dominant’ reading, is not as easy to pin down as we might at first have thought. Barthes’ important essay The Death of the Author (1977), addresses this issue – let’s see what he has to say.
“The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions…”
So Barthes begins by framing the business of understanding culture as centred ‘tyranically’ around the author. The author has historically been the main focus of interpretation. This is borne out by a long tradition in academic fields such as English Literature, in which the ‘correct’ interpretation of a text is approached more closely by knowing more about the author and their biography. Or in art, the work of someone like Vincent Van Gogh can only be properly appreciated by understanding the contingent details of his life – the severed ear, the mental illness, the sojourn in Brixton, etc. Barthes continues:
“… there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism […] is today undermined along with the Author.”
Hand in hand with the concentration on the author – and the ever increasing detail one must know of the author’s life in order to ‘properly’ interpret the author’s work – comes the ‘reign of the Critic’, or the pre-eminence of the ‘expert’. Experts are the repositories of correct interpretations, because they are the ones who have taken the trouble to discover the ‘true’, intended meaning of the author’s text. Barthes also states that these privileges that have been granted the author and the critic are being eroded and ‘undermined’. How so?
Well… a detour into the details of post-structuralist thought is beyond the scope of this lecture. Suffice to say that with the advent of postmodernist thought, and the dissolution of faith in ‘absolute’ values, which require an ultimate author (say, a God), notions of truth, and the importance of ‘intention’ have come to be undermined. Barthes is applying his understanding of a general shift in cultural thought to a specific idea about meaning – that shift in cultural thought which occurs as modernism gives way to postmodernism, structuralism gives way to post-structuralism, and reason and concrete ‘evidence’ give way to desire and ‘contingency’.
Anyway: let’s continue with Barthes on the role of the reader.
“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination […] we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
Don’t look for ‘unity’ and meaning in the intentions of the author: meaning can only be created by the reader. The emphasis that we’ve seen on the dominant reading is essentially vain. It is part and parcel of the vanity of the author, seeking to control their reputation with posterity through their memoirs and diaries, and it is an expression of the critic’s desire to be legitimate – the business of academia and the ‘cultural industry’ ensuring that they are still important and necessary. After all, without experts, surely we’d sink into a morass of dumbed-down ignorance and anarchy?
Actually, Barthes argues, the reader creates meaning, not the author, and the reader is potentially infinitely varied: not every reader is an expert. So are non-expert readings less valid? Is an expert’s reading more valid? What is the point, or need, for such elitism? Is it anything but elitism?
Forget the author, Barthes says; who cares where he was living, what he was drinking, who he was seeing, what he was thinking, when he wrote the text? The text is all that exists, and what we bring to the text in our interpretation is what we should care about.
Outside the text
In part two of this lecture, we’ll look in more detail at Barthes’ complex but deeply stimulating book, S/Z in which he first describes the writerly and readerly texts. We’ll also see what relevance these conceptual propositions have to interactive media in particular; ways in which the writerly text can help us to approach many other theoretical models; and we’ll also consider the irony (if you haven’t already spotted it) in someone claiming to have expertise (like me) explaining what Barthes’ text means.
