Empoword

Part Two: Text Wrestling 157 between symbol and symbolized is more one-to- one than between motif and theme. pattern a notable sequence; structure or shape; recurring image, word, or phrase found in a piece of rhetoric. reference a connection a text makes to another text. Can be explicit or implicit; might include allusion, allegory, quotation, or parody. Referencing text adopts some characteristics of the referenced text. symbol an artifact (usually something concrete) that stands in for (represents) something else (often something abstract). Techniques Authorial Intent In a groundbreaking 1967 essay, Roland Barthes declared that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” 57 In the fifty years since its publication, “The Death of the Author” has greatly influenced the way students, teachers, and academics conduct analysis. Most critics have come to acknowledge that the personal and historical context of the author is not entirely irrelevant, as Barthes might seem to suggest; rather, most people value Barthes’ notion that we must free ourselves from the trap of authorial intent. This is to say, what we have to work with is the text itself, so it doesn’t matter what the author wanted to say, but instead what they did say. Therefore, we should work from the assumption that every choice the author made was deliberate . This choice to avoid speculation about the author’s intent or personality is consistent with the theories of text wrestling analysis explored in this chapter’s introduction. Because meaning is always and only constructed through interpretation, we should let go of the idea that the author (or the “secret meanings” the author wrote into a text) is hidden somewhere beneath the surface. There is nothing “hidden” behind the text or in between the lines: there is only the text and those who interpret it. This idea might seem to contradict one of the central frameworks of this textbook: that unpacking the rhetorical situation is crucial to critically consuming and producing rhetoric. “Once the Author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless.” - Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”