"What's In a Name?"

"...that which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
Those Shakespearean lines famously uttered by Juliet to her star-crossed lover tell us that a name is nothing more than an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person called Montague, but not the family associated with it. Is a name nothing more than a meaningless convention? What is the function of a name? In the same sense one can ponder the notion of the 'author' and authorship. Here is why Shakespeare is great, he poses a question then steps away... Shakespeare, as Michel Foucault would say, establishes the "endless possibility of discourse." However, I need to stay on task and try to make some sense of Foucault's essay "What is an Author?".
In his essay Foucault comes to the conclusion that an author's name is not simply an element of speech. The purpose of the author's name is that it serves as a means of classification, that it can "group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts." One of the main points I extracted from his essay was that the function of the author is to specifically characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society.
However, it is very interesting that Foucault points out that these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author are our own psychological projections which allow us to handle texts. As a literature major I would definitely agree in the statement that the author helps explain the presence of certain events in a text. By reading the author's biography, one can analyze his position in terms of his socio-economic class etc. Another interesting point of discussion is how the 'author-function' arises. Foucault breaks it down to the division between the author and what he calls the 'second self' and that the author function arises out of the two.
Searching through some academic blogs in hopes of reading more about this notion of the author I found a blog entitled Meaningless that referred to John Lye's essay, "The ‘death of the author’ as an instance of theory". This essay brought up some interesting points, one being that how can we (the readers )guarantee (and should we even guarantee this?) that we are in fact reading the text 'properly' as the author would have had us read it. Our reading of an author's work is an interpretation which can result in various meanings. This point also brings me back to Foucault's argument over what is meant by an author's "work"? How is it decided what constitutes the work of a writer, considering that a writer would have obviously left behind hundreds of thousands of written artifacts...Again, these are such interesting questions to pose and it seems it all comes down to interpretation and meaning...and maybe Foucault is correct in stating that, "we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author".

Freudian Methods and Literary Criticism?

I have to unfortunately admit that I had never actually read anything written by Freud himself prior to this class. I had heard of his theories though, and had even used them to analyze literature. I also have to make another confession (and yes, it is related to what this post is going to eventually be about)...in one of the songs from the album 'Out of the Vein' by Third Eye Blind, the lead singer Stephan Jenkins sings the following lyrics:
Freud said that love
Was a good psychosis
But I don't know
I've had too many doses
He's a creep
And we all know that
He probably made it up
I always thought these lyrics were witty and funny. Not having a solid opinion of my own, I also did agree somewhat with those who thought Freud's theories were interesting, yet mostly perverse and misogynist formulations. After reading the selection by Freud in our text, I was particularly interested in going back over the text to find some sort of understanding of Freud's views on words and language. I was also very interested in how psychoanalytic criticism focused on the literary text as a manifestation of unconscious drives rather than focusing on the conscious drives or sociocultural influences. Even though Freud's ideas of condensation and displacement seemed so strange, they helped me to see how the psychoanalytic critic works to decipher symbols to uncover the 'true' structure or truth by reading through these various surfaces. Freud wrote that, "The 'creative' imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another" (26). Freud and psychoanalytic critics would then believe that the truth is disguised and needs to be unlocked. Freud also relates dream-work to language and remarks that dream-work has its counterpart in the development of language. They are similar because words and sounds are malleable, meaning can often be reversed or changed as can elements in a dream. Freud also states that only later were words linked up into thoughts, so there is an interesting relationships between the development of the mnemic images into thoughts and words. Words to Freud seem to be part of the whole, parts of puzzle pieces which need to be examined and shifted around in order to figure out the larger picture, the underlying 'true' structure.