foucault, eliot, and the Author- EDITED

So. After having the overwhelming feeling that I wanted to punch Eliot in the face for saying his piece on how the author should be completely emotionally separated from his work and how poetry is an escape from emotion (which, for the record, I think is complete crap) I have come to this summary. Foucault and company are saying that the author is not the source of an interpretation of his/her text, but rather the source of fodder for ongoing discussions (discourses was the word Foucault used). The author, then, should be completely ignored, because he is then essentially irrelevant in this new role because all he did was write the stuff, and it is now up to the readers to make something out of it.

I think I may have missed something, because that doesn't make any sense to me. I agree with Eliot when he suggests that the works with staying power are the ones that appeal to the emotions the whole world can feel, and not just the personal emotions of the author, but I can't say I find it believable that in order to create something with lasting effect you have to be emotionally distant from the work. If you're writing about Love, how can you write about it if you're not thinking about it, if you haven't felt it? How are you supposed to write about something and have it seem believable and accessible to the rest of humanity if you don't use your own experiences?

All I'm saying is that I'm not really buying it.

EDIT 1.22.08
After having changed my comment settings due to attention brought upon them by my estimable theory professor, I'm going to edit this post so that he can comment on it. (At least, I think my blog's the one he tried to comment on and couldn't, as I'm fairly certain I was the only one who as of 11:20 this morning had anything besides a "This is your first post; Edit Me!" notification on their blog.



I wrote the first part of this post after trying to wade through T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault all in one sitting. This was, in hindsight, a bad idea, and in future blog posts I will refrain from commenting until I have read the articles twice and discussed my thoughts and feelings with one of my esteemed classmates who will, for the moment, remain anonymous.

I will also attempt to word said posts in a slightly more academic manner. The first post was....erm...rather juvenile.

I still believe that Eliot's idea of emotional distance is bunk, although this idea did present me with a rather amusing image, noted in my margin: "The poet's mind is completely separate from the poet's body and that body's experiences, thereby functioning like the room full of monkeys with typewriters expected to turn out Shakespeare's complete works..."

Amusing, yes?

I do, however, agree with what he says about viewing the work in the context of the entire literary spectrum behind it. "I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." (P. 433, very bottom) You can read Beowulf and the Epic of Astrid and see that they're written in approximately the same style, but the Epic of Astrid (which, by the way, I wrote as a semester project my sophomore year of high school, which is why you've never heard of it) needs to be read with the knowledge that the writer, namely me, wrote after she had read and experienced a lot of feminist...it might be called literature, but propaganda or ideology seems a better term. We need a context for everything we read. This, again, is where I think I start disagreeing with Eliot. You don't need to really know anything about me to read the poem, but you need to know where I fit in the literary experience.