It's All in the Timing

So our topic in class this week was Readers & Subjects. Last week we focused on whether or not the author really mattered, and this week the spotlight was aimed at the reader. If the author doesn't determine the meaning of his work, who does? Certainly not the reader. If the reader created the meaning on their own, we would never know who was right or wrong.
On Thursday we focused a lot on William Carlos Williams's poem, "This is just to say." I have to admit that the first time I read it I laughed out loud. I thought that it couldn't possibly be a poem. There was no rhyming, no structure; and as we pointed out in class there was no meter or thesis/antithesis like a sonnet would have. So...what made it a poem? I'll get to that in a second. First, I got really interested in what really does make a poem a poem and I found this mini-lecture by Charles Bernstein on Google Video that I thought fit in a bit with what we were talking about:


Bernstein says that timing is what makes a poem a poem. Now, I'm not sure if he meant the same timing that I am thinking of, but time is what I was going to talk about. If the reader isn't creating a work's 'right' meaning, and the author isn't as well, who is? Society. Me and you, essays, critics, newspaper articles, reviews. All of these things influence what we think is the 'right' meaning of something. "This is just to say" could have been considered a horrible poem in another time. The words aren't extraordinary, nothing rhymes, and there is no solid meter. What, then, made it a poem? Our fascination with it did. Like Steve said in class, Williams is messing with our heads. It's a poem because we treat it like a poem, not because it fits any of this time's standards.
It's like what Stanley Fish said: The reader makes the meaning...but the meaning makes the reader. When a reader creates a meaning for a poem, for example, that meaning was already instilled in them by their past and by society today. When Fish's class took six names and turned them all into religious symbols, they thought they were reading a poem and so they approached it the way they were taught to.
Time. That's the key word. Whether a meaning has "stood the test of time," or whether it's affected by the society in this day in time, it's still time.

What's in an author?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Shakespeare presents something here in Romeo and Juliet that we have been discussing in class for the last week. Does it really matter if we know who the author is? Juliet seems to disagree. If Romeo and Juliet had been written by any other starving artist, it would have been just as famous. Barthes and Juliet would have gotten along because he proposes the same idea.
Barthes argues that who the author is should have no relation to what the text means to a reader. Should there really be one meaning to everything we read or every piece of art we examine? Does having an author limit our personal interpretations? Yes, it does. If we go into an author's background while reading his work, it's easy to see what we are 'supposed' to take away from the reading. Even Foucault admits that an author is a limitation to the reader, although he considers that a good thing.
Maybe we should all think a little more like Juliet. The author is expressing their freedom of speech by publishing their work; shouldn't the reader have freedom of interpretation? Yes, it is only fair that someone recieve credit for their work, but sooner or later the author's name stops being simply the person who wrote it. Shakespeare isn't just the playwright who introduced Romeo and Juliet to the world, he's now a literary genious. Like we talked about in class, one piece of famous work doesn't make everything an author writes an instant masterpiece. So, what really is in a name? If we took away the author's limiting influence from their work, how much more could we get out of it? How many more possibilities and ideas could be formed and explored without being criticized as not being what the author had intended? There would be limitless discoveries to be made in the famous texts whose meanings have been drilled into our minds since middle school.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

What's in an author?