Popular Music as Literature
Week One: The Author
The above link will provide you a .pdf file of the main required reading for the week: Chapter 3 of Bennett and Royle's text title "The Author"
Outline of Bennett and Royle
Begins with the J.D. Salinger's classic Catcher in the Rye. If you have never read it, feel shame. Reading it when you were an adolescent might have proved more impactful, but if you want to check it, grab the free .pdf file by pressing the button and/or check Thug Notes. You really should check out Thug Notes either way.
The emphatic but equivocal subject of the author is as problematic in literature as it is in popular music, even if popular music studies is behind in getting on board to the party.
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"Who is speaking?"
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"The author is a kind of ghost."
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"Who is behind this 'I'?" (20).
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"[...] literary texts can generate powerful feelings of identification not only between reader and character but also, perhaps more enigmatically, between reader and author" (20).
Can the same relationship between singer/band and listener be discussed?
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Shakespeare is to Dylan?
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If you feel ready to debate the list, then you
understand already the emphatic but equivocal.
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"The author is an absent presence, both there and not there. You may feel that you understand like nobody else what it is that the author is saying; and you may be willing to acknowledge that this author can express your opinions, thoughts, and feelings as well as or even better than you could" (21). But this is not a two-way street (usually) and the author may be dead.
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A little more required reading for you.
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Wimsatt and Beardsley vs Barthes vs Foucault.
The Intentional Fallacy
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"Just because it comes 'from the horse's mouth' does not mean that the horse is telling the truth, or that the horse knows the truth, or indeed that what the horse has to say about the 'words on the page' is necessarily more interesting or illuminating than what anyone else might have to say" (22).
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"'Conscious intention', in this respect, can always be considered as subject to the unconscious workings of the mind" (22).
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"Rather than say that the author is in control of the language that he or she uses, we might consider the idea that language is as much in control of the author [...] the system and rules of language inevitably dictate the possibilities of what someone can say" (22).
The Death of the Author
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"But rather than solving the problem of interpretative authority, 'The Death of the Author' in certain respects simply transfers it. Barthes ends his essay by declaring that 'the death of the author' coincides with teh 'birth of the reader'" (23).
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"...the critique of the notion of the Author (to which Barthes wittily gives a capital 'A,' thus highlighting the putatively god-like attributes of this figure) is just as valid as a critique of the notion of the reader (who, in effect, simply acquires in Barthes's account a capital 'R' instead)" (23).
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"Never fully present or fully absent, a figure of fantasy and elusiveness, the author only ever haunts" (23).
Author as a Historical Construction
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"The idea of the author is not a timeless given: the figure and significance of the author vary across time, and from one culture to another, from one discourse to another and so on" (23-4).
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"We want there to be an identifiable author for a text because this comforts us with the notion that there is a particular sense to that text" (24).
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"Contemporary literary theory draws together threads from psychoanalysis (the 'I' is in many ways by definition not in control of itself, since it is determined by what it cannot control, in other words, the unconscious), lingusitics (language speaks us as much as we speak language), ethnology (creativity, authorship, etc. are differently constructed and conceived in different cultures) and feminism (the Author with a capital 'A' is in many respects clearly - and oppressively - male: God, the Father, the patriarchal Presence)" (24-5).
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"Thus in women's writing [...] there has been and continues to bean emphasis on the person of the author, an emphasis that is in some ways quite conventional and 'conformist'" (25).
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"At the same time it is also true that what we think about a particular text, how we read and understand it, can probably never be simply dissociated from what we know (or think we know) of its author" (25).
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"But it is still important to bear in mind that there is something deeply problematic about any straightforward reduction of a text to what we think we know of the author's life, thoughts, habits, or ideas" (25).