Pages

Showing posts with label barthes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barthes. Show all posts

Thursday, 20 May 2010

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