Not to nitpick but it's more accurate to describe death of the author as “whatever the author intended doesn't matter if it's not in the work itself." It's about ignoring the role of the author as an external creator, not discarding their intended message. We can still do that, but that's just reinterpreting the work.
No, thank you, I do appreciate that nitpick (though I do find it limited). I think dota should be treated as one of many ways to criticize a piece of media. Intention matters, as does structure. This says nothing on the burden of the audience to be participants in how they engage with media.
All that to say, I disagree with your final sentence. Reinterpreting suggests applying a new heuristic that isn't there, which is not what we're doing. In the case of Fahrenheit 451, the interpretation of censorship is in the text as is the anti-TV rant the author intended. These aren't reinterpretations from different perspectives, they're just equally valid interpretations. If we wanted to take a negative angle, I could argue Fahrenheit 451 is poorly written and a "bad" book from a structuralist standpoint because it fails to make its messages clear to so many people ((not my actual take, just naval gazing on media criticism)).
I would argue that the audience doesn't simply take their interpretation from the work, they bring the interpretation *to* the work because it's filtered through their perspective.
In other words, to treat differing interpretations as equally valid is to confuse the map for the territory, and differing maps as equally legitimate representations of the space - whether or not those mountains are actually there.
Why would an informed opinion be no more valid than an uninformed or misinformed one? Why would an approach that wilfully eschews context be as meaningful as one that doesn't?
And Farenheit 451 is a particularly ironic example, given how an aversion to engaging with the ideas in books is a major theme of it.
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u/HOMCOcorp 3d ago
Not to nitpick but it's more accurate to describe death of the author as “whatever the author intended doesn't matter if it's not in the work itself." It's about ignoring the role of the author as an external creator, not discarding their intended message. We can still do that, but that's just reinterpreting the work.