The Death of the Author

Hello there! Happy Thursday! While I was looking for something to put up I found this super super old one, as you can see from the date. Over 4 years old, crikey! (For a long time I didn't know how to work photoshop, so i spent a couple of years just copying out the same 6 cartoons over and over again, trying to get them ABSOLUTELY perfect! Thank goodness for the clone stamp!). Anyway, like all Being & Tims, it's a not-very-sophisticated literalisation of a philosophical point: here the point in question is Roland Barthe's seminal essay 'The Death of the Author', where he suggests that imposing authorial intention as the source of the meaning of a text ignores the fact that texts can be interpreted in numerous different ways. A good example is whether or not Conrad's Heart of Darkness is racist: if you're the interested the Chinua Achebe argument is the most famous in this discussion. The notion of the death of the author then sort of leads to Derrida and post-structuralism and a 'flux between interpretations'. People are beginning to question whether this is a particularly honest approach to literature or life (while Derrida isn't wrong it's not clear that we don't always already operate under certain assumptions which post-structuralism doesn't touch.) Being & Tim certainly think so!

I've also started an Etsy Shop for those of you who might want to buy a set of Being & Tim comics, they're not expensive, I just thought I'd put my fear of the internet on one side and give it a go. So if you want one or two or many, then go HERE!

Ta ta for now! Becca xo