That's Not What 'Death of the Author' Says: A Let's Read Theory Special

Everyone's heard that the Author is Dead, but a lot of folks are confused about what that means. In this Let's Read Theory special, dive deep into Roland Barthes's influential essay and find out why Authors can't give everything away... even if they'd like to.

Listen to the full half hour Let's Read Theory special for free on Patreon, and check out the extended readthrough of the essay itself.

StIT Reviews: Gnosticism Take 2 and Let's Read Theory: Reader Response

I'm hard at work bashing together the last elements of A Bodyless and Timeless Persona, my upcoming book about theme in Homestuck, and as a result tonight's article has a bit of an odder format than usual. It's a mix of my review series, which highlights some of the shorter pieces I've written for my $1 Patreon backers, and my Let's Read Theory series, where I go through theory texts and try my best to translate them into less academic language and consider applications for the ideas.

The material I'm posting tonight is united in both its applicability to Homestuck, and its interest in the way that we interact with language, meaning, and interpretation as readers. Carrying over gnosticism as a theme of course makes sense. I already did it once back when I posted my last couple of Homestuck articles, because core to my understanding of the comic is the gnostic nature of its narrative. The leap to language isn't all that hard once you've got that starting point. The word was with God and the word WAS God, remember? Language is deeply embedded in the traditions that Gnosticism is a part of.

But along with this is the reality of elisions and gaps that come from interacting with texts that are fragmentary, apocryphal, and originally to be read with a repertoire that modern readers simply don't have. This is where the idea of reader response becomes relevant, and the two texts I'm covering tonight, in audio posts accessible to everyone for free over on my Patreon, are foundational to this body of theory. Stanley Fish's "Is There A Text In This Class?" questions how we can do criticism, or do really anything at all, if language doesn't have an inherent set of meanings. He considers the way that language might be thought of as contextual, allowing us to still communicate despite the arbitrary nature of words. Wolfgang Iser considers the possibilities of interpretation opened up by considering a text not as a finished work of art in itself, but as the starting point for a game of imagination between word and reader, where the "literary work" emerges only in the subjective readerly experience. These texts can help us to understand the different levels on which a complex and avant-garde text like Homestuck operates, and the way it takes advantage of the gaps and contextual demands of language, and I think they also help us to explore the interpretive openness that often appears in Gnostic-like texts.

To explore that, let's consider another modern Gnostic comic, one that was allegedly part of the inspiration for The Matrix and one that blew my tiny fragile eggshell mind as a slimy teen:

Grant Morrison's The Invisibles

Let's Read Theory: Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter that things--matter, objects, energy, processes--can be just as active politically as humans.

In this special podcast series, I try to explain the basics of Bennett's arguments for this "vital materialism" and then explore some of the ways that it might be used by us. The series consists of a bunch of chapter-by-chapter summaries and responses and one big overview podcast that summarizes and responds to the book as a whole.

This podcast is designed for people unfamiliar with the weird, wild world of Theory--I'm trying to take Jane Bennett's ideas and translate them so that people outside of academia can understand and work with them. If you find this podcast useful, let me know you like it and I may add this as a new regular feature of Storming the Ivory Tower! (If you hate it, let me know that as well, and I won't add it as a new regular feature!)

This post indexes each chapter by chapter summary and the final podcast.

Chapters 1 and 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Let's Read Theory! Summary Podcast