Actual Author Of The Text example essay topic

"The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind is its power of communication with all other minds". This is the first quotation that really jumped out at me. I have always wondered what make some books really popular while other books tend to just fizzle out and never really get much acclaim. Why do books like The Da Vinci Code go to the top of the New York Times bestseller list while others like Literature, Criticism and Theory never even come close to achieving the audience of the former? This quote seems to sum that up. While providing some really interesting topics for people interested in the study of English literature, the extent of the audience, or people interested in what the book is telling, is not nearly as large as hordes of people who line up to find conspiracy theories in things ranging from monumental buildings to blades of grass.

The popular success of a work really depends on the author's ability to connect with as many readers as possible. The way the book talks about the relationship between the reader and the author, or as the book says, the reader's projection of the author, kind of ties in with the concept of layers in the reading that the previous section in the book was talking about. There is the actual author of the text, but the reader only ever gets to know his concept of the author through the reading - another level of separation from reader to author. I think that this is a really interesting aspect to consider in the reader's interpretation of the events and characters in the novel.

I was struck by the line on page 21 about the language controlling the author as much as the author controls the language. I have had my own personal experiences with writing short fiction stories in a class last term. At first, I had a fairly clear plan of what my story was going to say and how I was going to do that, but sometime during the writing process, my story kind of ran away with me off on its own direction. I wasn't getting very far trying to take control of the story again, so I ultimately let the story take over... as weird as that sounds. Once I was done, I read through the completed story and, to my surprise, it came across as something that I would like to have read much more than what I had actually been planning on writing. I don't know if this is what the Bennett and Royle had in mind when writing that particular part, but it seemed to speak loud and clearly to me.

I really like how the book refers the author in Barthes' terms as a ghost. A presence sort of there, but not really. It gives the reader space to play around with the writing, to come up with his own interpretations and meanings for the text, whereas if the author were a fully present figure it would limit the interpretations of the text to just one: his. I like how this text reaches back to the previous section about the reader and then presents information about the same kind of concept, but from a different perspective. On page 23 the authors write that "many others are interested in thinking about literature in ways that do not depend on regarding the author as the origin of the meaning of the text or as the authoritative 'presence' in that text".

This kind of draws back to what I had to say about Don Quixote in my last reading response and how Cervantes actually does this in his text by saying that he is only relating the story from some abandoned writings. In that, he separates himself from the writing in a very extreme way. By doing this he also gives himself a lot of room for commentary on the characters and their escapades, which he does quite often.