In the beginning of class, we began to contemplate: What constitutes the Author?; How does their presence (observable or not) in a literary work inform the reader’s relationship with the text as linguistic content and/or bodily content?; If the presence of the author matters in the way we engage with literary texts, what can be said when the author, through writing, creates their own disappearance?

With these guiding questions in context with our reading of Renaissance lyric poets Louise Labé and Gaspara Stampa, as well as Baroque lyric poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, we found that the double sided quality to language is what gave these poets the ability to occupy tactically ambiguous spaces as authors in their works. Their tactical positioning as female authors added a politicized element to the works of each poet, especially in the class discussion and reading of Louise Labé’s “Sonnet II”. As a poet borrowing from the Petrarchan literary tradition, we observed how this sonnet played with the reader’s ability to identify the point of referent: The author. With her use and repetition of the romantic “O,” Labé captured the Petrarchan sensibility of human longing for a distant or “coy” lover. However, rather than using this poetic strategy to create her own existence and linguistic embodiment as a poet, her subtleties in deploying the “O” rather place her into a space that is both inaccessible and unknowable to the reader. The “O,” as a product of longing, also captures feelings that cannot be defined or totalized by language, as it is a word deployed in the Romantic tradition to capture (though, incompletely) the sublime. In the reading by Warnke, it is described that “…the lyric poet suffers from the fact that his or her art is more closely bound to its language than is the art of the dramatist or the novelist.” (Pg. 11; my emphasis). We presume, that it is precisely this difficulty with language that is experimented with by the utterance of both the “I” and the “O”. In addition, if questions concerning the supposed impasse of subjectivity are posed, it is these words ability to occupy a different space than both subject vs object that makes them so intriguing.

This “third space,” as it were, was observed in the theoretical writings of Michel Foucault as contributing to the discourse of linguistic and textual subject formation. In his language:

“We could also, in the same treatise, locate a third self, one that speaks to tell the work’s meaning, the obstacles encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of already existing or yet to appear mathematical discourses. The author function is not assumed by the first of these selves at the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than a fictitious splitting in two of the first one” (Foucault 216).

What we wish to assert is that by occupying a certain “third,” tactically ambiguous space, writers like Labé escape the dualistic thinking that arises when one conceptualizes textual subject formation as strictly author and text, or even author and writing. A space like this disrupts the historical privileging of the author as an entity that is either wrapped up into their texts or forever distanced from them to a place of non-importance. This triangulated existence can also be expanded to other textual entities like reader, writer, and character, as all three engage in a temporal relationship of psychic projection that may, at times, be an expansion of static and singular notions of subjectivity.

As we began to unpack the implications of an expanded subjectivity, the class referred to the plurality of the self as a kind of “multiplicity” that is internalized by an equally vacillating subject. With this in mind when contemplating the subject position of female authors and readers, what may be inferred from Warnke’s observation that “the woman had to have, in addition to her innate talents, a certain kind of social identity…” (Warnke 13). Does this claim not infer a kind of static subject position in the social existence of the poet? Or is it that the static qualities of that identifiable subject position grant access to the multiplicities that are presupposed to be internalized? This multiplicity of vacillating subjectivity is what writers like Sharon Meagher would classify as a kind of masculine privilege that is problematically made unavailable to female writers as those who are expected to occupy a fixed position while writing; for the male author is granted mobility in his usage of “feminine” writing techniques while the female is simultaneously expected to write in the realm/way of the feminine while maintaining a fixed subject position in a continuous vulnerability to patriarchal confines. This is the “‘feminine’ double bind” that she refers to in her quotation of Miller on page 52 of “Writing/Reading Barthes as Woman”. However, if social identity (and therefore social existence), as a condition of fixity, allows an oppressed subject possibility in their access to this multiplicity, can it not be said that there is a tactical quality to this static subjectivity?—as this position allows for more direct access to the ambiguous spaces of meaning that women have been historically denied. It is this syntactical and linguistic variance of meaning as its own meaning that figures like Labé access in her disappearance and reappearance as the Author of her works.

With these ideas in mind, the class seemed to end where we began by posing the question: Why does the subject position of the author matter? We believe that the contextual variances that give rise to this debate are precisely what remain in control by the triangulated relationship between author, reader, and text, as three textual entities that change through the very linear progression of time. It is the author’s ability to grapple with this condition that allows for one to reassert their position as Author, or disavow it entirely.

Scribe: Sam Beeker

Group Members: Brittany and Alex