Death of the author

[Leanne]

Great post. It has come up before a few times and if I can find the threads I'll link to them, but this deserves its own discussion anyway. Personally I subscribe quite heavily to the post-structuralist theories, although I don't like them being called post-structuralist, because I'm anti-label and it's really just a term that American scholars had to make up in their desperate need to categorise, but that's another story

When addressing a new piece of literature in class, I present author/historical context last -- before they learn about who wrote it and what was going on, I want to see how much they can get purely from the text, because once those who/when questions are answered it tends to colour every other piece of analysis. Of course, I do always ask them to find those pieces of information out and critically evaluate with them in mind, because this enriches the text also, but I want them to take what the text alone offers first.

And I will reiterate again and again that when it comes to posts here, the poem is NOT the poet. We should never make assumptions about a person based on their art.

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I found this thread buried way back in discussions -- it kind of rambles toward the end, because we're all a bit ADD, but there are good points buried in there