The Necessity of Language

Language is just as culture-bound as are the traditional habits and value orientations characteristic of the society whose members use it– especially writers.

But literary texts, recorded experience, and written creative expressions that shape human desires should consider biographical knowledge and author intention to be properly interpreted.

The post medieval times heralded the proliferation of numerous philosophical texts that echoed the prominence of an author. As both figure and product of modern society, the author during this time, inherited cultural attributes that shaped his writing style, personality, and schema. In addition, the author, as a member of his or her respective society, followed a set of unconscious, semi-conscious rules, and conventions that reflected his own language, time, and culture.

As a result, some literary works persist(ed) because different genres and periods of time connect(ed) both reader and writer. Genres, meanwhile, had a history within history itself—with some flourishing at the expense of others. This suggests, therefore, that history played a defining role in society’s conditioning of the author’s biographical background or personality while appealing to the (modern) reader.

Peter Lamarque, however, notes that the author is as volatile as history is. Unified collections of literary texts, in addition, seem to appear as mere projections of multiple authors that help readers connect with the text, not the author. These texts, according to Jean Michel Foucault, are “ideological products” that do not explicitly show an author’s intention. Instead, they are “repressive and restricting” and hinder “proliferation of meaning” among readers.

The author’s role, then, is to serve merely as a guide and an “informer” of the text, while his writing prowess and creative genius “serve to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse” (Lamarque, ____).

Our role as readers and modern-day scholars, meanwhile, is to know the language (style) of the text where it was originally copied from. In order to do this, however, Friedrich Schleiermacher suggests that to discern Aristotle, for example, first, we must at least know a little bit of Greek and its numerous linguistic features. Second, we must also become aware of the culture where the context might have been written. Often, as readers, we could know more about what the author is implying because we are conscious of the historical and cultural background that is reflected on the text we are reading.

This treatment, at last, provides a much more comprehensive understanding of the text. Because completely assimilating both the author’s vocabulary, listeme, intention, and background knowledge even more the uniqueness of what he says, the reader understands the writer better than he understood himself (Schleiermacher,        , cited in Gadamer, H, 1999)

Reference:

Lamarque, P. (1990). The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy. British Journal of Aesthetics, 319-331.

Schleiermacher, F. (     ) cited in Gadamer, H. (1999). Truth and Method. Second Revised Edition.