Nothing New Under the Sun

From the ancient ages to today, the questions, meanings, and functions within art and literature have not seen any changes. In modern periods, texts have started to be examined in the context of their authors and audiences. Using this method, readers or critics have obtained the liberty to reshape the inner dynamics of texts.

According to Compagnon, a text carries more meaning than the author's choices, personality, the inner dynamics of the text, or the author's life, within the connection formed with the author's existence. In the essay titled The Death of the Author, published by Roland Barthes in 1967, he evaluated the author as a "modern figure" produced by society and separated the text from the author.  

Emphasizing that critiquing does not just consist of mentioning Baudelaire's failures, Van Gogh's insanity, and Tchaikovsky's sins, Barthes underlined that a work's meaning must be sought from its creator. However, Barthes also said that, from the moment a text is shared with an audience, the author, a figure created by society, dies. The author's death is the price for the reader's birth.

Modern texts have liberated the reader by leaving the shadow of the author. Texts were thought of as games that broke their own rules, and certain functions of authors, such as limiting and choosing, were accentuated. The reader and critic interpreted texts as they desired by taking new and different meanings from each one, such that interpreting interpretations became an indicator of knowledge. In the 16th century, the feature of knowledge became interpreting and interpreting interpretations.  Foucault's essay titled What is an Author is an answer to Barthes.

Emphasizing Beckett's saying, "What matter who's speaking" in the article, Foucault indicated that it was necessary to focus on a text's inner structure, construction, and dynamics rather than its author. Like Barthes, Foucault also advocated for the right to kill the authors of texts, in the reader-author relationship, by removing their attributes to immortalize the text. Foucault also thought similarly to Derrida and others regarding the structure of a text. According to Foucault, the world is a massive text for the people, worthy of being read and interpreted. To analyze this multidimensional structure, created through different texts, institutions, and phenomena, we must develop skills. In its own episteme, the world presents itself to us as a place full of encryptions and signs that need to be solved.

Foucault remarked that every period and society has an epistemological perception unique to itself. Characters, connections formed through similarities, and loops turn the text into a part of the game. Therefore, one must track its relations with other texts and phenomena to understand a text.

The creation of works, especially in Western cultures, has been evaluated as the immortalization of authors. With their tendencies to write, the authors have sacrificed themselves to banish death. It is required for authors to remove all signs of their self-hoods and be dead in their texts.  Despite being products of their authors, all texts have become independent of their authors. Just as the chapters within a book cannot be indubitably separated from each other, no book or work can be autogenous. All texts, and even works, are connected to others influenced by those before them and those who will influence after them. These connections look just like the knots and loops within a web. Thus, he attempted to analyze the functions of discursive practices and the rules and mechanisms that form these functions rather than describing the authors or the things said by the authors because, there is nothing new under the sun.