Authority

“Question authority.”

Do you trust the author in what he or she writes?

What is the purpose of their work? Is there a message?

Should we believe everything the author says?

“Premoderns placed their trust in authority. Moderns lost their confidence in authority and placed it in human reason instead. Postmoderns kept the modern distrust of authority but lost their trust in reason and have found nothing to replace it.”
Postmodernism 101 (White, 2006)

Does the Author have the Authority?

In contemporary criticism and critical theory, authority designates the quality of a literary text which ensures its worth as a credible source of meaning. However, in Postmodernism, playful relationships between the composer/narrator and text invite the audience to question their traditional role in a text.

Postmodernists produce “open, discontinuous, improvisational, indeterminate, or aleatory structures. They also reject the traditional aesthetics of ‘beauty’ and of ‘uniqueness’.”
A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Selden, 2005)

Between every author, text and reader, the challenge of meaning and absolute truth can exist, breaking conventional Modernist beliefs. Rather than producing works of ‘beauty’ and of ‘uniqueness’, authors turn to playful techniques and styles.

The authority no longer lies with the author, but rather with the reader. Therefore, every text provokes unique responses from individual readers. This notion is explored in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and Michel Foucault's’ essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1969). They criticised the notion of the author as forcefully placing an ultimate meaning on the text.

Premodern Perspective and the Modern turn

In Modernism, authority in this period has distinct religious overtones. At the turn of the seventeenth century, intellectual forces were beginning to challenge the previously dominant autocratic leadership and authority (e.g. the Church). Galileo Galilei, between 1610 and 1638, published various works (Discourse on the Comets, 1619) that challenged previous beliefs about the workings of our universe.

Modern Approach

• The work is a product of the composer’s mind.
• Author has the “author-ity”.
• The author's voice - The author's message and meaning is reflected through thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Postmodern Rejection of Authority

The postmodern way of thinking questions the grounding of authority on any single absolute foundation. Postmodernists would not eliminate authority all-together, as this would presume power is insignificant, but rather they view authority as constituted through the shifting and contextual uses of power and not deriving from one foundation.