Lesson Learned

Happy Hump Day!

For this week, I want to further delve into this “author” and “reader” discussion from the pervious class.  It was mentioned that an author’s word is not always trustworthy.  Why?  Well, the author’s intention is not properly executed in his or her writing.  Texts do not necessarily just say what the author means – it may say too much, it may say too little.  Also, the ideas of the author are never original, just a string of recycled words imitated from previous sources. 

In the defense of the authors, I do not think the reader is all that trusting either.  Both sides share the blame. Barthes describes the ideal reader on page 6 of The Death of the Author, as “a man without history, without biography, without psychology.”  If we were to follow these distinctions, it would be impossible to be the reader.  We all possess our own beliefs, traditions, and prejudices that involuntarily and unknowingly develop as we grow up and are exposed to the world.  And this bias automatically transmits into our reading of the texts as we inherently interpret the writing.  Today, I realized firsthand the faults of a reader.

My marketing class had a guest lecturer that displayed a black and white picture of a person sitting on the sidewalk, bundled up in clothing, with a trash bag next to him.  He asked the class a series of questions: Who is this person? What is the level of his or her skills?  Does he or she have any potential?  Many people characterized the person to be a homeless man with a low-medium skill level and who does possess potential but is wasting it due to laziness, drug addiction, or alcoholism.  Then the guest lecturer enlightened us.  The mysterious man in the picture was a war veteran that had to sacrifice his career as a lawyer to pay for medical care and financially support his ill mother.  This ultimately led him to losing all his money, his family, and his house – leaving him on the streets.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement.  Not only that, but I felt rather ashamed of my automatic negative impression of the man.  I learned my lesson.  Instead of being an author, creating my own story based on my opinions, I should be a reader, having an open mind, clear of judgment, and automatic conclusions.  This will better my act in hermeneutics.

You stay classy Emory.