Kelly Gildea
Professor Willison
Expos 20 | Problems of Meaning: Language, Literature, and Life
Paper 2, Scaffolding 1: Choose a topic and motivate
For paper 2, I plan to respond to prompt 3, which reads, “Use David Foster Wallace’s short story,
“Good Old Neon,” as a test-case for the style of literary interpretation Roland Barthes advocates
in his essay ‘The Death of the Author.’ Does the effort to interpret Wallace’s story validate
Barthes’ position or highlight its shortcomings? (Use ‘Unfinished,’ D.T Max’s New Yorker
profile of Wallace, for background information.)” I plan to respond to this prompt because the
texts that it draws upon, “The Death of the Author” and “Good Old Neon,” have been two of my
favorite readings during this unit, and I look forward to digging deeper into these authors’ ideas
and how they relate. Furthermore, the prompt encourages an in-depth analysis of whether or not
interpreting Wallace’s story validates the idea that the author is irrelevant to a reader’s perceived
meaning of a text, a debate that we’ve engaged in regularly in class and for which I believe both
sides have great arguments. It will be an invigorating challenge to develop my position and
support that position with strong reasoning and a creative counterargument. Therefore, this
prompt is of great interest to me and I look forward to completing my paper in response to it.
Furthermore, I believe that this prompt addresses an incredibly important topic. If the author
truly is inconsequential to the reading of a text, as Barthes argues, “Good Old Neon” must be
read vastly differently than it would be if the author was not. To what extent should readers be
looking for autobiographical elements in the text? How does this change their interpretation of its
message? Is whether or not the author communicates hope or despair something that the author is
authorized to determine, or is it truly up to the reader? How does this change the significance of
the text, and the incredibly heavy subject matter it addresses, to readers? The answers to all these
questions depend largely upon the position that I take in response to the prompt, rendering the
topic addressed by my paper not only engaging but highly relevant to literary interpretations and
the cultural significance of “Good Old Neon,” as well as of similarly important works of writing.