As a minor follow-up to the detailed post by Jim Twiggs this morning
(of which I get to see an advance copy), I'd like to draw attention to
a still earlier incarnation of the "Death of the Author" phenomenon.
The 19th-Century French psychologist/philosopher/critic Hippolyte Taine
produced what I believe was the primordial version of the author's
death, in the modern sense, and a spirited rebuttal to Taine occupies a
significant place in Iulii Aikhenvald's writings, especially in the
theoretical introduction to
Silhouettes of Russian Writers and
some of the other essays. Aikhenvald (as many of you know, Nabokov's
close friend in the 1920s) was a major early describer of the "reader's
role" in shaping a literary work's ongoing form. Evgeny Dobrenko, I
think, called him the first "reader-response" critic. I believe that
Nabokov's comment to Proffer reflects, at the very least, his sense of
kinship with Aikhenvald's view of the literary work as "aesthetic
object". I have a project on Aikhenvald on my back burner, with some
information on Taine, but don't have any specifics to offer right now.
Hoping to finish that piece up within the next year. Taine, by the
way, was a huge intellectual figure leading into the 20th century,
represented by close to a dozen volumes in the Nabokovs' St. Petersburg
library by 1911. Mostly forgotten now (one of my French colleagues
told me 'nobody reads Taine') he appears extensively in Joseph
Carroll's
Evolution and Literary Theory (Missouri, 1995).
Stephen Blackwell
All private editorial communications, without
exception, are
read by both co-editors.