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To Barthes, whose views are akin to Kristeva's, the absence of the author is the hallmark of literature. He distinguishes between 'work' and 'Text': the Text is enthroned, while the work is considered an object of consumption (1986: 62). The author, he says, "is reputed to be the father and the owner of his work; . . . the Text on the other hand is read without the Father's inscription" (61). Elsewhere he argues that: "literature (it would be better, from now on, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world-as-text) a "secret", i.e. an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity we may call countertheological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to halt meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law" (54). |
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In the view of both Kristeva and Barthes everything is or ought to be up to the reader, and the text does not or ought not to imply a meaning. At the other end of the spectrum we find those critics who reinstate the author and even the author's intention. According to Broich, for instance, intertextuality occurs "when an author in composing his text not only is aware of using other texts but also expects his recipient to recognise that the relation between the text he is reading and other texts is intended by the author and that it is important for the understanding of this text. Thus intertextuality in this more restricted sense presupposes the successful realisation of a very specific communication process, where not only the author and the reader are aware of the intertextuality of a text but where also both partners in the communication process take into account the other's awareness" (1985: 31).3 |
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Many critics engaged in the interpretation of a separate poem or novel tend towards a more restricted concept of intertextuality, such as that of Broich. That is to say, they do not consider the reader supreme, and do not deny the text a meaning to be sought by the reader. Moreover, as a rule the ideological overtones of Kristeva and Barthes are lacking. However, it is not surprising that objections are often raised to the notion of the 'author's intention'. In his stimulating work, Claes puts it as follows: "It is often suggested that the reader must try to discover the author's intention. Such a method leads almost inevitably to psychologising, whereby the text as it stands is reduced to a more original 'text': the intention of its author. This is quite a presumptuous undertaking: surely we cannot look into the author's |
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(footnote continued from previous page) |
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übergeht." |
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3 "Wenn ein Autor bei der Abfassung seines Textes sich nicht nur der Verwendung anderer Texte bewusst ist, sondern auch vom Rezipienten erwartet, dass er diese Beziehung zwischen seinem Text und anderen Texten als vom Autor intendiert und als wichtig für das Verständnis seines Textes erkennt. Intertextualität in diesem engeren Sinn setzt also das Gelingen eines ganz bestimmten Kommunikationsprozesses voraus, bei dem nicht nur Autor und Leser sich der Intertextualität eines Textes bewusst sind, sondern bei dem jeder der beiden Partner des Kommunikationsvorgangs darüber hinaus auch das Intertextualitätsbewusstsein seines Partners miteinkalkuliert." Cf. Pfister (1985) 27, and Schulte-Middelich (1985) 206. |
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