Foucault's Author-Function And Structuralism

There were a variety of concepts of meaning and methods proposed in approaching literature. In this assignment, I intend to apply Foucault’s ‘author-function’ and structuralism to read and interpret Jean Rhys’ short story. Foucault argued the necessity to examine and analysis the author as a position and function in discourse in ‘author-function’ analysis. Connors (at pp 59-66) also proposed that looking into the author’s life/experience, intentions and unconscious motivations are some ways in unraveling meanings of a work. To apply such analysis, knowing the author is a great starting point. Rhys was born in Dominica, her father a Welsh and her mother a Dominican Creole. She felt displaced from her birthplace, given that she was actually

When Mr Sawyer died, Eddie did not immediately relieve himself from his English identity, but to enter his father’s library and claim ‘my room’, ‘my books’ (Rhys, p 40, emphasis added). In fact, Eddie did not feel happy at all when the two women stormed in the library they had long hated, pulled out the books and classified them into ‘to be sold’ or ‘to be burnt’. He and the narrator, instead, grabbed two books to be burnt and ran out of the house. This naïve, hopeless ‘rescue’ of books reflected the conflict inside Eddie. To illustrate such conflict in a broader sense, Eddie’s act was an ironic attempt to rescue his English identity, in which he also seemed to hate before, when his mother longed to, and finally could, take it away (by burning the books, metaphorically). It is also notable that Rhys had deliberately chosen English-related books like Encyclopaedia Britannica and British Flowers. Such analysis allows me to have the freedom to take the why and how the author produces the literary text into consideration. The ‘author-function’ approach unearths some of the complex relationships between the real author and the fictional selves (the children). Rhys may have experienced the same ‘grey area’ as the children, as well as faced the conflicts and struggles between her cultural identities. She may also unintentionally reflect

Several contrasts may be identified by applying Barthes’ five codes of fiction, for instance, between male and female (sexual); between high and low social status (social); between civilised and non-civilised (educational); between the white and the coloured (racial); between the colonising and the colonised (colonial). They were discussed and intensified as the plot moves on. For example, the attempt to burn the books means to me as eliminating the Western power (colonial conflict) and exterminating the Western ‘privilege’ of knowledge, symbolised by the library and its books enjoyed by Mr Sawyer and the white (educational conflict). Yet, they were not reasoned in any means, and made the story ordinary and fictional: insufficient to influence the