Paper Details

Name: Madhulika Sah
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-3, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 93-98

Traditionally, the author had been referred to as the creator, a friend, philosopher and a guide to the readers. Perhaps at times, the author also assumed the role of a god, who controlled the activities, existence and the destiny of his/ her characters in the text. To name a few, Victorian novelist like Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Emily Bronte and dramatists like Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Webster and others harped on the theme of moral justice and Character is Destiny, where the wrong doers were punished at the end of the story and the good won over evil. This led to the spectators’ sense of psychic satisfaction as order and calmness restored at the end of the text through a process of purgation or catharsis as termed by Aristotle in Greek and Elizabethan revenge tradition. This restoration of order and moral sense of justice was controlled and manipulated by the writer’s temperament and the audience’s general reaction. Therefore the meaning of the text thus emerged was influential and not natural by any means. This unlimited ‘power of the authors’ was put into question by the post-modernist and post- structuralist critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and Stanley Fish. They found the word ‘author’ problematic in a number of ways. The conventional role of the ‘author’ suffered a major setback in the hands of the contemporary critics. The god-like figure was transformed into a non-existent entity, whose participation in the text, created by him zeroed down to a mere ‘writer’ only, who had no role in framing the meaning of his creation. Thus, the narratorial voice, which earlier attributed the meaning of the text, because of his / her cultural background, has no role to play in the modern times. It is only the interaction between the text and the reader through which the meaning of the text evolves.
KEYWORDS
Post-modernist; post-structuralist; construction; auteur; writer; narrator.