SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 15
Inaugural Issue Introduction
n 1967, a little-known essay called “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes changed
U.S. literary history. I call it ‘little-known’ not ironically, but because—as is true of most
critical writing these 昀椀fty-odd years following the publication of Barthes’s essay—while literary
theorists and critics may be fans, outside that privileged circle, Barthes, his essay, and most works
of literary critique remain obscure, unread, and of little interest to the general public. There is a
reason for this.
Publication of Barthes’s essay coincided with the rise of postmodernism. It also had an
unintended, secondary e昀昀ect on literature. English literature was born as Romanticism in the
early 1800s and evolved as follows:
1798 - Romanticism
1840s - Realism
1890s - Naturalism
1910s - Imagism
1920s - Formalism
1940s - Existentialism
1960s – Postmodernism
As the toddler that was literature grew, readers lingered to delight in the beauty of
Romanticism, and then in the grit of Realism, while authors sought to get their footing in a new
creative world. Beginning with Naturalism, the evolution of literature accelerated, such that a
new prescriptive literary movement emerged roughly every twenty years until postmodernism,
after which… nothing.
Why the pause?
Beginning in the 1960’s, most literary theory shifted focus from theories of creation to
symptomatic reading and suspicious hermeneutics—to critics ‘uncovering hidden truths’ in texts.
The chasm this created between critique and creatives—like it or not, intended or not, suspicion
of the text and ‘its intentions’ is equivalent to suspicion of the author and ‘their intentions,’ at least
as far as authors are concerned—left creative theory and prescriptive literary theory in a small
cell to die a death by starvation through inattention/disregard/neglect. In creating this chasm of
critique, critics also abandoned the reader—Eliot, Woolf, Coleridge were widely read both as
creators and as critics. So were Robert Penn Warren and Mary McCarthy. More recently? Maybe
Harold Bloom. Maybe.
The SQN was initially founded with the goal of re-centering the author to bridge the chasm
between theory and practice. It was born from an intuition that there was something fundamentally
misguided about ‘killing the author.’
We have been working on the inaugural issue you hold in your hand for almost a year. Our
team’s work to launch the SQN for me coincided with the end of my Ph.D., resulting in an
extended period of deep and broad reading of post-2010 literature, published and unpublished
(thanks to this journal). The more I read, the more I discovered commonalities, echoes, mirrored
tendencies among works.
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