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The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account-previously unstudied-of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates-with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author's deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes's declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author.
List of contents
Chapter 1: With the Intention of Opening Up the Future Decolonial Authorship Before The Death of the Author.- Chapter 2: The Ghost of the Writer Edouard Glissants Poetics of the Whole World.- Chapter 3: An Appetite to Begin Intention and the Political in the Work of Edward Said.- Conclusion : Writing Storytelling Community.
About the author
Michael Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (2018). His essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review and many edited books.
Summary
The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author.
