The death of the author?
How much attention should we pay to an author's biography when analysing a novel? And what of historical context?
We’re getting into the theoretical weeds a bit today. If anything feels particularly difficult or dense, I wonder if listening to this post may be more helpful.
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Today we’re thinking about the role of context and the role of the author’s biography when we come to analyse a book. We’ve covered a lot of technical aspects of the novel, but before we get to the books, I think it's important to think about these two things more fully in a post of their own—especially in light of the discussions we're having at the moment about whether you can separate the art from the artist. And I wanted to introduce you very briefly to a very influential body of theory which I think guides the way most contemporary literary analysts would approach a novel.1
When I was in school, my English lessons often seemed at least as much about teaching the history of the texts we studied as much as analysing the text itself. We had to learn about Elizabethan and Jacobean England in order to understand what Shakespeare was saying. We had to learn about the restrictive social norms of Victorian England to read Dickens or Eliot. Occasionally we would also learn biographical details, too.
For parts of my university career, the approach was similar, especially in the early stages of my undergrad and especially for older texts. But as I progressed through the years, the emphasis shifted. With the influence of post-structuralist theory from the 1960s and everything that came after it, now we were to attend to the slipperiness of language, to understand a book within the context of discourses, rather than historical or biographical facts. This was particularly true of contemporary literature, some of which seemed to speak to these bodies of theory directly (like the postmodernists, for example).
For a long time I ran with this. I always separated the narrator and author in my head the way you’re supposed to in academic essays, lest you sound like a naive teenager who confuses an author writing something for them endorsing it or having experienced it themselves. But as I’ve become more and more distanced from my immersion in post-structuralist theory, I find myself pondering the role of the author again.
Today I went back and re-read ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes, a famous essay that has come to typify this movement in some ways in popular culture, though it is in fact just a very small part of a rather heterogeneous body of work attributed to post-structuralism. It is also commonly a little misunderstood
