Literature Foundation 2009
Week 9
for next week: authority in literature and/or literary interpretation
The quotation in the essay title -- 'Theory is subversive because it puts authority in question' -- is taken from this book. Please read the context of the quotation as helpfully extracted for you by Google; it has a useful and very straightforward definition of the three main sources of authority in a literary text. These (they are sometimes known as the modes of existence of a literary text) are: the author; the text itself; the reader. Please meet in your small groups to consider and discuss the following:
1. Imagine that you have written a novel. How did the meanings in that novel get constructed in the course of writing? What degree of control did you have over those meanings? Where did they come from?
2. What happens next? How does your novel become a printed text? What is a slush pile? What factors affect publication? How are the meanings affected by that process? What forms of publication are there other than the printed book? How would they affect the meanings of the novel?
3. Your novel is now being by a reader. What, as exactly as you can describe it, happens during that process?
4. Your novel is now being discussed in a seminar. What happens in that process? What is going on?
5. What is the attitude to authority in Chaucer? Please read The Parliament of Fowls looking for what the constructed narrator says about authority. There is a handy parallel text here. How does this differ from a text constructed within Romanticism?
6. Can you find different attitudes to authority in literature in other cultures? For instance, in oral literature? Or other subcultures in this culture? What, for instance, happens to authority on the Internet?
