A phrase showing the deep reorientation of some literary critics and theorists to the text.
It shows the authors’ turn in critical and theoretical attention to the texts and the mechanisms by which they are created.
In many contemporary literary theories and critiques, the emphasis has shifted from viewing the text as an expression of the author’s ideas, attitudes, and values, and so on. to its perception as a place where readers, with the help of interpretive acts and context, try to extract meanings from the signs.
This emphasis on the role of the reader in recent times and the endowment of characters with additional meanings sometimes goes too far, denying any authority and importance of the author or writer (the current creator of the text).
When reading a text, we learn nothing about the author’s soul. The text, as the word itself shows, is something woven (from the Latin textere, weave), but the often intriguing and never-ending thread of signs is really the work of the reader, not the author.
Indeed, Roland Barthes concludes his famous essay, The Death of the Author, with the statement that “the birth of the reader must be at the expense of the death of the author” (1977, 148).
However, there are contradictions in literary theory and criticism about how to recognize the rights of writers and the rights of co-writers.
On the one hand, it seems wrong to define the meaning of a text in terms of what is called an “author’s idea” (which is better referred to here as a writer’s idea). This definition exaggerates the authority of the historical agent (the man of flesh and blood) who wrote the actual words from which the text is woven, and minimizes the autonomy that the writing actually possesses.
On the other hand, it also seems wrong to deny the importance of the writer’s life and his explicit intentions for understanding literary writing.
One can read the writings of Virginia Woolf in the light of the fact that she was a victim of sexual violence, without being reduced to a psychobiographical code. In the same way, one can read the novels of Henry James in the light of one’s own understanding of the genre, without reducing these novels to pure illustrations of the writer’s literary theory.
Literature is more than the writer’s dream, but his dream, life, and intentions are an invaluable source for unraveling this “more”.
We usually assume that a writer is not an idiot scientist, but more or less knows what he has produced. The reader joins the writer as a co-author, illuminating the dimensions and depths of meaning, often even going beyond the writer’s conscious intentions and initial intentions.
Recognition and even applause of the role of the reader is a hallmark of modern literary theory and criticism.
As Terry Eagleton suggests, roughly speaking, the history of modern literary theory can be periodized in three stages: over-engagement with the current historical author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century), extreme care for the text (New Criticism), and the characteristic turn of attention to the reader. The reader has always been the most neglected of this trio, strangely, for without him there would be no literary text at all “(1983, 74).
It is noteworthy that in 1991. Umberto Eco states that in the course of the last few decades the rights of interpreters have been exclusive “(1991, 6). In every communicative act (including reading a literary text or interpreting an aesthetic work) there are addresser and addressee. But is reading really a life-and-death struggle in which the rights of the author-reader can be won only when all the traces of the author-writer are destroyed? Or is it more of an exciting, albeit difficult, art? And is it fair to exclude writers and writers from this joint effort because they come from a past tradition (which they trusted completely) with absolute sovereignty? Democratizing reading, in the beginning, may require the execution of a broad class of nobles (“authors” or “writers”), but the result of this process should be a general inclusion, a refusal to exclude relativity of any significant part of the total production of meanings.
Thus, the revival of the author does not need to include as its consequence any attitude towards the reader.
