So I find myself up against 'the man' again. Only now I realize no good can come from continuing to avoid it, so now I am going to attempt to "get on it" as KFitz suggested-- only I am not sure what to get on really. (Thus the basis of my reluctance to even start) I find myself again (in a very karmic way) with this dilemma of blogging, and my stubborn determination AGAINST it. I can whip up responses to readings and edit them and print them out and hand them in -- that I've been trained to get done, no problem--. But now we have moved beyond that teacher-paper-student connection and now it's something online, on a screen that is being published for the critical eyes of an entire whole class to see, and it's on the WORLDwide web so that's a new layer of publishing-- and hey, it seems I'm totally scared of authorship. Whew, naming it is the first step to overcoming it, yea?

I just finished reading Marchessault's: Is the Dead Author a Woman?, and after sifting through, what most of the time was next to impossible to comprehend, I have come up with a question so powerful, that it shall end all other questions about Deaths of Authors...Why? Why is it important that the dead author be male or female, as either will only serve to confuse the reader, who, according to Barthes, shouldn't care about the author in the first place. Sure, there are people (readers) who come to the table with pre-reservations on gender, ethnicity and class when experiencing a work, but at least personally, the background of the person is more fun to find out after the work is finished and thought through, almost as a self perscribed afterword.

Wow, I really regret not reading the Nesbit first. I honestly read the Foucault first, got a couple of interesting points out of it, but really just couldn't stand much of his philosophical ramblings. Little did I know that Barthes was even worse! Not only was he an even more abstract and dense writer, but I didn't even agree with most of what he was saying (How does the author not exist outside of his text?). Finally, though, Nesbit put all of that into perspective by informing us of the social context surrounding the two essays. Plus making some interesting points of her own. If only I had t