Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2000) 418-9
Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez &
Simone Winko, eds., Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen
Begriffs. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999; 553 pp.; ISBN: 3484350717 (pbk.);
DM 218
This volume primarily includes the proceedings of the
1997 conference “Rückkehr des Autors?” (Return of the Author?); together with
the reader Texte zur Theorie der Autorschaft (edited by the same team
and published in Stuttgart by Reclam this year), this volume offers the most
comprehensive survey of recent theories of authorship in the German academic
discussion.
The volume starts by questioning why is there a such
a marked difference between theoretical reflections on authorship and the
legitimate and necessary practice of analyzing the author in textual interpretation.
In their introduction, the editors provide a short discussion of the most
important concepts of the author since antiquity, as well as the theoretical
debates since the 1950’s. In the latter,
they distinguish four dominant theoretical approaches: authorial intention
vs. text meaning (hermeneutics); author vs. narrator (narratology); real author
vs. implied author (narratology and reader-reception theory); and the “death
of the author” issue characteristic of poststructuralism.
The editors express their wish to examine the theoretical premises
underpinning the notion of ‘author,’and question theories from a metacritical
perspective.
While both the discussion on intentional fallacy and
the death of the author are historical events and as such subject to critical
examination, many pro and con critical assumptions and full theoretical approaches
have been frozen into dogmas, and thus decontextualized and dehistoricized;
the editors champion the need to reexamine and deconstruct such dogmas.
The anti-intentionalist and poststructuralist critique
of the author is regarded, by the editors and many contributors, as a symptom
of paradigm changes in the literary criticism and theory of the 1960’s, which
led to a new form of political self-localization. The central thread of most
of the essays is the rejection of anti-intentionalist and poststructuralist
concepts of the author, its often unproven premises and unreflected use in
literary criticism. Some authors even regard [end of page 418] Foucault’s
position as purely speculative (van Peer 114), as they harshly criticize poststructuralist
theory for its postulations and assumptions. As Colin Martindale puts it provocatively,
the deconstructionist approach is “delirium rather than theory” (184).
In short, this collection is a plea for the return of
the author in critical practice and theory. Similar to the role of the (real)
author in postcolonial literature, it is possible to announce that, in theory,
the author strikes back (authors themselves were never very much concerned
about being called dead; they continued to live happily ever after and are
still very much alive).
The book is divided into four sections: “Autor und Intention”
(author and intention), “II. Autorkonzepte in der Literaturwissenschaft” (concepts
of the author in literary research), “III. Autor, Politik und Geschichte”
(Author, politics, and history), “IV. Autor und Medien” (author and the media);
for the detailed table of contents and the whole text of the editors’ introduction,
the reader is invited to hit
A few remarks about some contributions: Martindale promotes
empirical methods of research which allow him to come to statistically based
results, for instance in the field of readers response to literary texts.
He shows that the postulate of non-identical readings which is maintained
by reader-reception theories is simply wrong, that identical or at least almost
identical readings of text are normal which would support intentionalist author
concepts. John F. Burrows demonstrates computer-assisted methods of style
analysis which prove helpful in attributing texts to certain authors. Martha
Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi discuss the global dimension of authorship and
regard it not only as a single, personal phenomenon but also as a term meant
to “protect” collective creations like folklore artefacts, cultural heritages,
and the practical knowledges of traditional cultures (their obvious implications
for copyright laws need not be stressed here). The relevance of concepts of
the author in other media for criticism and literary theory (collective authorship
in film theory, style analysis in music, the demystification of abolished
authorship in hypertext-concepts) are among the subjects of the essays printed
in section IV.
Reader, beware: the price of this paperback volume is
a modestly outrageous DM218!
Kerst
Walstra
Universität
des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken