Abstract
"I become speech." Death and Return of the Author i the Perspective of Philosophy of Identity focuses on the question of inclusion of the author into the interpretation of literary text and aims to highlight the fruitfulness of such an inclusion as well as some of its dangers. The book is divided into three parts.
In the first part the author presents a polemic account of some antiauthorial approaches, especially the "death of the author" as appearing in the texts of R. Barthes, M.
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, along with a short mention of antiintentionalism of W. K Wimsatt and M.
C. Beardsley and a theory of the model author by U.
Eco. The common feature of the antiauthorial theories is a reductive idea of the author and his relation to text - the author is presented as a sovereign controlling all meaning and enclosing the interpretation into a coherent whole.
The author of the book argues that these problematic aspects of authorial interpretation are not necessary features of authorial interpretation and only consequence sof the problematic underlying notion of the author-subject. The second part of the book intends to present an alternative theoretical understanding of the "real author" using the philosophy of identity od J.
Butler and P. Bourdieu.
These authors are proposing a theory of a personal identity that is not understood as the "real thing" that would be available for a complete delimitation, description, and evaluation, but as a never-ending process that i furthermore never fully in the person's power. Building on this revised notion of personal identity, we can redefine the "real" author not as the base and center of the text, but rather as a dynamic "text" in itself, that arouses new questions and is in a relation of mutual exchange with literary work.
The second part will also introduce some challenges and problems of authorial interpretations: the relation of authorship and marginalized/dominant identities (D. Eribon) and a role of autobiographical/fictional writing in interpretation.
This part introduces the theory of posture by J. Meizoz that can serve as a fruitful starting point of authorial interpretation.
The final part focuses on selected literary texts of four Czech authors from the second half of 20th century, that are interpreted as gestures of literary self-presentation. The interpretation of the Autobiografical Trilogy by Bohumil Hrabal, Pavana for the Dead Infant by Libuše Moníková, Life is Elswhere by Milan Kundera and The Picaresque Picture Plane on the Background by Věra Linhartová uses the theoretical apparatus of preceding chapters and elaborates especially on two oppositions: universality/particularity and foreign/my own.