The Death of the author: a cognitive approach to demystifying large language model’s narratological intelligence

La Mort de l'auteur : une approche cognitive pour démystifier l'intelligence narratologique des grands modèles de langage

Abstract

Authors explore the world within and without in an attempt to depict things meticulously artistically to the reader, who would engage with the text hermeneutically. The poststructuralist school of thought dethroned the former and reinstated the reader as the originator of the epistemic frameworks and interpretive possibilities. In this paper, I will argue that the death of the author was a mere philosophical idea that sneaked into the literary world devoid of any scientific foundations. The studies reported here establish for the first time Barthes’s eight postulates on the basis of which he dethroned the author, and foreground the cognitive basis supporting our argument. First, research in embodied cognition corroborated our view that the author’s body plays a pivotal role in the mental formation of thoughts and the expression thereof at the level of language. Second, theory of mind research further accentuated the agency of the author in the production process of meaning. Thus, the function of the author in the literary work is defined by the multifarious ways mental defiance operates in the narratological fabric.