author – Swifterature

The end of this month will see the release of the film Argylle, directed and produced by Matthew Vaughn. It’s a spy thriller based on a debut novel by American author Elly Conway. So far, so normal. However, when you find out that the film rights were purchased by Apple in 2021 for $200 million, years before the novel was even released, and that there are no pictures of, or interviews with, Elly Conway available online, despite her instagram account having over 40,000 followers, things start to look a little strange. As anyone who knows anything about publishing will tell you, Apple do not pay millions of dollars for the film rights to as-yet-unpublished debut novels by nobodies, and if you want to publish any book these days, good luck to you if you’re not willing to take every chance for self-promotion that you can, including plastering your face all over social media. Who the hell, then, is Elly Conway?

[By Birgit de Schrijver] In the third seminar we looked at the role of the author. More specifically the influence of the author when it comes to our interpretation of certain texts (or songs). When looking at “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, we came across many nonsense words which made it difficult to understand the poem. However, this gave us a lot of freedom in interpreting it since there didn’t seem to be a right or wrong meaning. Where Jabberwocky gave us a lot of freedom, part of this was taken away by Carroll's “Through the Looking Glass”. Here, Humpty Dumpty gives us (sometimes confusing) explanations for the nonsense words. Unfortunately, by telling us what something means, we are deprived of our own interpretation. We discussed that often the explicit interpretation of the author limits the interpretation of the reader. [Click above image to read more]