Authors Intentions
Tue, 7 Apr 2009, 07:13 pmPaul Treasure39 posts in thread
Authors Intentions
Tue, 7 Apr 2009, 07:13 pmOkay, this is a serious question for me...
A number of different posts recently have gotten quite seriously into Dramatic Theory, and one thing that keeps popping up is "The Author's Intention".
Now, when I was younger I had Roland Barthes' theory of "The Death of the Author" drummed into me.
To try and put it simply - The meaning of any work of art or literature is the meaning that the reader/watcher gets from it, and any interpretation is valid as long as the text bears it out, and what the author originally intended is largely irrelevant...
(My apologies if I put it clumsily, it WAS YEARS ago)
But this was a literary/philosophical theory, not a purely dramatic one.
My question is:
Has Roland Barthes been thrown out and someone forgot to forward me the memo?
or,
As his theory is a general literary theory not a specific dramatic one, has it just not filtered through to the performing arts?
Can't say I'm losing sleep over it or anything, but it has piqued my interest :-)
Fair enough
Wed, 15 Apr 2009, 09:59 pmWhat writer intends for their work to be reinterpreted? At the end of the day the writer is thinking about the story, and the emotion at the time they are writing it. Maybe some contemplate how their plays we will be 'reinterpreted' hundreds of years later by people living on the other side of the world who speak an entirely different jargon...but most playwrights probably don't think past the first staging of their play, and novelists past finishing the novel.
And yet if they are a really good playwright their work won't be so culturally, and contexually bound that it can't be performed in a different time period, language, setting, context and still connect with the audience.
I don't think like an Elizabethan actor, writer, director let alone audience member. For one I'm better educated than a woman of my class would have been, for another I'm less lightheaded (no corset.) So I am assuming that how I interpret Shakespeare will never be exactly how it was originally intended.
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