Implied author
Encyclopedia
The implied author is a concept of literary criticism
developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author
and the narrator
, the term refers to the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a literary work is written, which may differ considerably from the author's true personality.
The distinction from the narrator is most clear in ironic works, such as Jonathan Swift
's A Modest Proposal
: the narrator cheerfully offers his proposal that poor Irish people sell their children as food for the rich, but unlike Swift or the reader, the implied author is unaware of the horror inherent in the proposal.
Author Saul Bellow
once observed that it was not surprising, with all the revision that goes into a work, that an author might appear better on the page than in real life.
, Thomas Carlyle
and Benedetto Croce
, Intentionalists P. D. Juhl and E. D. Hirsch Jr.
insist that the correct interpretation of a text reflects the intention
of the real author exactly. However, under the influence of structuralism
, Roland Barthes
declared "the death of the (real) author", saying the text speaks for itself in reading. Anti-intentionalists, such as Monroe Beardsley
and Roger Fowler
, also thought that interpretation should be brought out only from the text. They held that readers should not confuse the meaning of the text with the author's intention, pointing out that one can understand the meaning of a text without knowing anything whatsoever about the author.
Wayne C. Booth
created the term implied author to distinguish the virtual author of the text from the real author. In addition, he proposed another concept, the career-author: a composite of the implied authors of all of a given author's works.
Gérard Genette
used the term focalization
to distinguish the point-of-view of a work ("who sees?") from the focal position of a work ("who perceives?") In his 1972 book Narrative Discourse, he took issue with Booth's classifications (among others), suggesting three terms to organize works by focal position:
zero focalization
internal focalization
external focalization
Mieke Bal argued that Genette's focalizations did not describe the implied author, but only the narrator of the story.
Seymour Chatman
, in his book Coming to Terms, posits that the act of reading is "ultimately an exchange between real human beings [that] entails two intermediate constructs: one in the text, which invents it upon each reading (the implied author), and one outside the text, which construes it upon each reading (the implied reader)." Because the reader cannot engage in dialogue with the implied author to clarify the meaning or emphasis of a text, Chatman says, the concept of the implied author prevents the reader from assuming that the text represents direct access to the real author or the fictional speaker.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
also considered the text as a conversation
with the reader.
, Alexandre Astruc
and François Truffaut
advocated the auteur theory
: the director is the primary author of the film. They hated the Hollywood studio system
, applauding the independent United States film movement of the late 1960s to early 1980s known as New Hollywood
. This movement started to wane in the late 1970s following the commercial success of Steven Spielberg
's Jaws
and George Lucas
's Star Wars
. The more commercial Hollywood sensibilities heralded by Spielberg and Lucas resulted in films typically undergoing multiple rewrites by plural authors, and sometimes changes in director, during the production process.
Chatman said that films no longer have a real "author"; therefore, the implied author of the film must be postulated in order to analyze the story. However, advocates of post-modernism do not postulate an implied author.
Teruaki Georges Sumioka researched the modern filmmaking process, seeing it as an act of authorship by the body corporate
of the film studio, not the director. In this way, he regarded film as a compilation work, similar to the way that United States copyright law
treats a dictionary.
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
developed in the 20th century. Distinct from the author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and the narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
, the term refers to the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a literary work is written, which may differ considerably from the author's true personality.
The distinction from the narrator is most clear in ironic works, such as Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
's A Modest Proposal
A Modest Proposal
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in...
: the narrator cheerfully offers his proposal that poor Irish people sell their children as food for the rich, but unlike Swift or the reader, the implied author is unaware of the horror inherent in the proposal.
Author Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
once observed that it was not surprising, with all the revision that goes into a work, that an author might appear better on the page than in real life.
History
Following the Hermeneutics tradition of GoetheJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
, Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
and Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
, Intentionalists P. D. Juhl and E. D. Hirsch Jr.
E. D. Hirsch Jr.
Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr. is a U.S. educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia...
insist that the correct interpretation of a text reflects the intention
Intention
Intention is an agent's specific purpose in performing an action or series of actions, the end or goal that is aimed at. Outcomes that are unanticipated or unforeseen are known as unintended consequences....
of the real author exactly. However, under the influence of structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
declared "the death of the (real) author", saying the text speaks for itself in reading. Anti-intentionalists, such as Monroe Beardsley
Monroe Beardsley
Monroe Curtis Beardsley was an American philosopher of art. He was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University , where he received the John Addison Porter Prize...
and Roger Fowler
Roger Fowler
Roger Fowler is a world-renowned and long-serving British Linguist and professor of English and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. He is well-known for his works in stylistics. Together with Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, he authored the influential book Language and Control,...
, also thought that interpretation should be brought out only from the text. They held that readers should not confuse the meaning of the text with the author's intention, pointing out that one can understand the meaning of a text without knowing anything whatsoever about the author.
Wayne C. Booth
Wayne C. Booth
Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago...
created the term implied author to distinguish the virtual author of the text from the real author. In addition, he proposed another concept, the career-author: a composite of the implied authors of all of a given author's works.
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
used the term focalization
Focalization
Focalization is a term coined by the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette. It refers to the perspective through which a narrative is presented. For example, a narrative where all information presented reflects the subjective perception of that information by a certain character is said to be...
to distinguish the point-of-view of a work ("who sees?") from the focal position of a work ("who perceives?") In his 1972 book Narrative Discourse, he took issue with Booth's classifications (among others), suggesting three terms to organize works by focal position:
zero focalization
- The implied author is omniscient, seeing and knowing all; "vision from behind".
internal focalization
- The implied author is a character in the story, speaking in a monologueMonologueIn theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
with his impressions; "narrative with point of view, relflector, selective omniscience, restriction of field" or "vision with".
external focalization
- The implied author talks objectively, speaking only of the external behavior of the characters in the story; "vision from without".
Mieke Bal argued that Genette's focalizations did not describe the implied author, but only the narrator of the story.
Seymour Chatman
Seymour Chatman
Seymour Chatman is an American film and literary critic, a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley...
, in his book Coming to Terms, posits that the act of reading is "ultimately an exchange between real human beings [that] entails two intermediate constructs: one in the text, which invents it upon each reading (the implied author), and one outside the text, which construes it upon each reading (the implied reader)." Because the reader cannot engage in dialogue with the implied author to clarify the meaning or emphasis of a text, Chatman says, the concept of the implied author prevents the reader from assuming that the text represents direct access to the real author or the fictional speaker.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...
also considered the text as a conversation
Conversation
Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...
with the reader.
In film
André BazinAndré Bazin
André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.-Life:Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918...
, Alexandre Astruc
Alexandre Astruc
Alexandre Astruc is a French film critic and film director born 13 July 1923, in Paris .Before becoming a film director he was a journalist, novelist and film critic...
and François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
advocated the auteur theory
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
: the director is the primary author of the film. They hated the Hollywood studio system
Studio system
The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under...
, applauding the independent United States film movement of the late 1960s to early 1980s known as New Hollywood
New Hollywood
New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the "American New Wave", refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s to the early 1980s when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and...
. This movement started to wane in the late 1970s following the commercial success of Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
's Jaws
Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,...
and George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
's Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
. The more commercial Hollywood sensibilities heralded by Spielberg and Lucas resulted in films typically undergoing multiple rewrites by plural authors, and sometimes changes in director, during the production process.
Chatman said that films no longer have a real "author"; therefore, the implied author of the film must be postulated in order to analyze the story. However, advocates of post-modernism do not postulate an implied author.
Teruaki Georges Sumioka researched the modern filmmaking process, seeing it as an act of authorship by the body corporate
Legal personality
Legal personality is the characteristic of a non-human entity regarded by law to have the status of a person....
of the film studio, not the director. In this way, he regarded film as a compilation work, similar to the way that United States copyright law
United States copyright law
The copyright law of the United States governs the legally enforceable rights of creative and artistic works under the laws of the United States.Copyright law in the United States is part of federal law, and is authorized by the U.S. Constitution...
treats a dictionary.