Thammasat University students interested in English studies, education, literature, linguistics, and related subjects may find it useful to attend a free 15 August public lecture: Post-critique, the Decolonization of the Curriculum, and the State of English Studies Today.

The event, on Tuesday, 15 August 2023 at 3pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Faculty of Liberal Arts Thammasat University.

The speaker will be Professor Derek Attridge FBA, a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals.

The TU Library collection includes a number of books written and coedited by Professor Attridge.

These include The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce and Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995.

Other books by Professor Attridge are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=6383789928323150&set=pcb.6383790551656421

The event will be moderated by Dr. Cameron McLachlan of the TU English Language and Literature Program.

In an interview posted online, Professor Attridge expressed his views about the intentions of authors when they write texts:

There is the fact that writers have conscious intentions in creating works of literature, and the fact that those works may be readable in terms of those intentions (though this need not be the case, as many writers themselves have admitted; conscious intentions may not be actualized in what gets written, and the unconscious may play a significant role in composition). Then there is the fact that reading is a complex process, also partly conscious and partly unconscious, in which many kinds of prior information play a part, including information (or misinformation) about those authorial intentions. If I’ve read a letter in which an author states clearly what he intended in writing a particular work, it’s likely that my understanding of that work will be colored by what I know, however strong my theoretical attachment to an anti-intentionalist position. Something similar is true, of course, of biographical information and evidence from manuscript materials.

The second issue is the one I’ve tried to address with the concept of authoredness. Quite apart from any sense of an “implied author” created by the text is my awareness that the work I’m reading has a real author (or perhaps more than one author, as in the case of translation). The work may be anonymous, or by an author about whom I know nothing, but I still read it as authored — as the product of an author’s intentional act. We feel, as you say, that we are able to get in touch with the author when the work moves us or challenges us or amuses us. To experience the inventiveness of the work is to experience the traces of the actual creative labor that produced it, however inaccessible that labor may be to historical accounting. It’s here that I see an ethical dimension to reading: one has a certain responsibility to, and indeed for, the author — to read with care, not to impose one’s own assumptions on the work, and so on.

To answer your question, then — how can we read creatively when this may lead to departures from what the author intended? — we have to put it in these two different contexts. In the first context, I would follow, as far as it is possible to do so, D. H. Lawrence’s maxim: trust the tale, not the teller. Whatever external information I may have as to the author’s intention should be tested against the work itself, and although one can’t control unconscious influences one can at least make a conscious effort to let the work win out in any conflict. What you call a “friction between authorial intentionality and the inner workings of the text” can arise only in this context, and although one should certainly treat records of author’s intentions with due seriousness (and they are always open to a variety of interpretations), it is those inner workings that matter most.

In the second context, the sense of a strong authorship, such as you say Dante constructs, is not a matter of external evidence but a product of one’s reading of the work and forms part of any full engagement with it. There is therefore no possibility of friction between intention and inner workings; the experienced intention is part of those workings. But a responsible reading is also a creative reading: since what one brings to the poem is singular — each of us has a unique history that informs our engagement with a particular work — one’s reading is also singular. Creativity or inventiveness in reading is simply what happens when the singularity of the reader encounters the singularity of the work. There is no way the actual author could have foreseen the singularity of my, or anyone else’s, reading; it necessarily goes beyond actual intentions. But to consciously go against the intentionality encoded in the work, “reading against the grain,” I would say, is to subject the work to something other than a literary reading — it becomes an instrumental reading in the service of a political, historical, or other end. […]

I think what has to be emphasized is that reading a literary work with the fullest engagement is not a matter of applying to the text frameworks of understanding, historical information, linguistic and generic rules, and so on, but a process that is as much passive as it is active, allowing the work to generate its own pathways through all that we may bring to it. The achievement of a good reading — one that is responsive to the work’s singularity, inventiveness, and otherness, attentive to the implicit intentionality of the work — is not a matter of the exercise of ingenuity or the deployment of knowledge but of letting the work gain access to what one knows, recalls, and feels. This will include the mental residue of all one’s reading.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)