Ammon's review
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
by Paul Auster
Ammon's review
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel by Paul Auster
Ammon's review
rating:
After reading other reviews, I feel it's important to comment: this novel (like much of Auster's "metaphysical" work) needs to be contextualized in twentieth century literary theory, interpreted through a particularly noir-ish and mystery-heavy lens. In particular, readers might want to investigate a little in the the notion of the "death of the author" (associated most closely with Roland Barthes but also with the analytic idea of the "intentional fallacy.")
The crux of the idea of the "death of the author" is that the author enjoys no special relation to a text once they have sent it out into the world (Plato says that the text is now orphaned): here, the author is made to account for himself this fact. But the author has a totally different ethical relationship to their creations than any sort of other relationship since their creations do not exist apart from them (they have no autonomy or objective worth, to employ a Kantian idiom). Conse...more
The crux of the idea of the "death of the author" is that the author enjoys no special relation to a text once they have sent it out into the world (Plato says that the text is now orphaned): here, the author is made to account for himself this fact. But the author has a totally different ethical relationship to their creations than any sort of other relationship since their creations do not exist apart from them (they have no autonomy or objective worth, to employ a Kantian idiom). Conse...more
