[the_old_crowd] Umberto and the Mystery of the Vanishing Author

[Mike & Susan Gray]

La Gatta miaowed (with a beady eye on Signor Eco's salmon),

> About which author are we speaking? It can't be Umberto Eco, 
> because he is a he, and the last time I looked, he was alive 
> and well and traveling with a salmon.

LOL.

Just in case this all got too obscure:

Uncle Umberto is known for saying that the empirical author is irrelevant to
understanding a text. Neither the author's intentions while writing nor his
opinions afterward have any special bearing on the way a text should be
interpreted. 

I think he takes it too far, but he has reasons for what he says. See the
following article (by Eco himself), where he tells a whole bunch of stories
about how his own perceptions of his writing process were out of sync with
the texts he actually wrote. Whether this begs the point (since he's
correcting himself) is for you to judge. It's a fasciniating read:

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_author.html

JKR, on the other hand, has created a cottage industry out of people
attacking every sentence she's ever spoken with a fine toothed comb. (Of
course, people like Steve might take very nicely to Eco's theory: if authors
*don't* count, we don't have to get fussed when they prove that they *can't*
count.)

The textual device called Eileen, OTOH, quite properly points out that it
doesn't have a clue about the correct interpretation of an earlier post
nominally attributed to the same textual device.

Baaaaaaa,

Mike, who should probably shut the heck up and go back into hibernation.