Theory

Question 1

Barthes, From Work to Text, 1964

Answer 1

“the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production. It follows that the text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is traversal”

“the text requires an attempt to abolish… the distance between writing and reading”

Question 2

Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1968

Answer 2

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the meaning of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety writings, none of the, original, blend and clash.”
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”
“life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.”
“the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”

Question 3

Michel Foucalt, What is an Author, 1969

Answer 3

“the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses”

“the author function… does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals”

Question 4

Foucalt, Preface to Transgression, 1977

Answer 4

“Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage”

Question 5

T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

Answer 5

“the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”