death of the author essay questions

A Summary and Analysis of Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Death of the Author’ is an influential 1968 essay by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. But what does Barthes mean by ‘the death of the author’? This important short essay was crucial in the development of poststructuralist literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s, as many English departments, especially in the United States, adopted Barthes’ ideas (along with those of other thinkers such as Jacques Derrida).

Let’s take a closer look at Barthes’ argument in this essay. You can read ‘The Death of the Author’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of it.

‘The Death of the Author’: summary

Barthes begins ‘The Death of the Author’ with an example, taken from the novel Sarrasine by the French novelist Honore de Balzac. Quoting a passage from the novel, Barthes asks us who ‘speaks’ those words: the hero of the novel, or Balzac himself? If it is Balzac, is he speaking personally or on behalf of all humanity?

Barthes’ point is that we cannot know . Writing, he boldly proclaims, is ‘the destruction of every voice’. Far from being a positive or creative force, writing is, in fact, a negative, a void, where we cannot know with any certainty who is speaking or writing.

Indeed, our obsession with ‘the author’ is a curiously modern phenomenon, which can be traced back to the Renaissance in particular, and the development of the idea of ‘the individual’. And much literary criticism, Barthes points out, is still hung up on this idea of the author as an individual who created a particular work, so we speak of how we can detect Baudelaire the man in the novels of Baudelaire the writer. But this search for a definitive origin or source of the literary text is a wild goose chase, as far as Barthes is concerned.

He points out that some writers, such as the nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, have sought to remind us, through their works, that it is language which speaks to us, rather than the author. The author should write with a certain impersonality: writing is done by suppressing the author’s personality in order to let the work be written.

Moving away from our traditional idea of ‘the Author’ (Barthes begins to capitalise the word as if to draw a parallel with a higher entity, like God) can help us to see the relationship between writer and text in new ways. In the traditional view, the author is like a parent, who conceives the text rather as a parent conceives a child. The author thus exists before the novel or poem or play, and then creates that literary work.

But in Barthes’ radical new way of viewing the relationship between the two, writer and text are born simultaneously, because whenever we read a literary work we are engaging with the writer here and now , rather than having to go back (to give our own example) four hundred years to consider Shakespeare the Renaissance ‘author’. ‘Shakespeare’, as writer, exists now, in the moment we read his works on the page in the twenty-first century.

Writing is a performative act which only exists at the moment we read the words on the page, because that is the only moment in which those words are actually given meaning – and they are given their meaning by us, who interpret them.

Instead, then, we should think of not ‘the Author’ but ‘the scriptor’ (Barthes used the French scripteur in his original essay, a rare French term which means, essentially, ‘copyist’). We shouldn’t view a work of literature as a kind of secular version of a sacred text, where the ‘Author’ is a God who has imbued the text with a single meaning.

Instead, the literary text is a place where many previous works of literature ‘blend and clash’, a host of influences and allusions and quotations. Indeed, ‘none of them’, Barthes asserts, is ‘original’. Instead, the text is ‘a tissue of quotations’.

Barthes concludes ‘The Death of the Author’ by arguing that imposing an Author on a text actually limits that text, because we have to view the literary work in relation to the author who wrote it. Its meaning must be traced back to the person who produced it.

But writing, for Barthes, doesn’t work like that: it’s a ‘tissue of signs’ which only have meaning when the reader engages with them. The meaning of a text lies ‘not in its origin but in its destination’, and that in order for the reader of the text to exist and have meaning as a term, we must do away with this idea that the author determines the meaning of the text.

‘The Death of the Author’: analysis

‘The Death of the Author’ makes several bold but important claims about the relationship between author and literary text: that works of literature are not original; and that the meaning of a work of literature cannot be determined simply by looking to the author of that work. Instead, we as readers are constantly working to create the meaning of a text.

Writing is ‘the destruction of every voice’ – not the creation of a voice, which is how we tend to think of a creative art such as writing. The literary text is not original, either: indeed, every text is a ‘tissue of quotations’.

This may strike us as Barthes overplaying his hand – surely works of literature contain original thoughts, phrases, and ideas, and aren’t literally just a string of quotations from existing works? – but Barthes is interested in language throughout ‘The Death of the Author’, and it’s true that in every work of literature the words the author uses, those raw materials through which meaning is created, are familiar words, and therefore not original: merely put together in a slightly new way.

(A notable exception is in the nonsense works of Lewis Carroll, whose ‘ Jabberwocky ’ does contain a whole host of original words; but part of the fun is that we recognise this poem as the exception, rather than the normal way works of literature generate their meaning.)

‘The Death of the Author’ was a bold and influential statement, but its argument had numerous precursors: his emphasis on impersonality, for instance, had already been made almost half a century earlier by T. S. Eliot, in his 1919 essay ‘ Tradition and the Individual Talent ’, although Eliot still believed in the poet as an important source of the written text.

And in the mid-twentieth century, New Criticism, particularly in the United States, argued that the text had meaning in isolation, separate from the author who produced it, and that searching for authorial intention in the work of literature was something of a red herring.

‘The Death of the Author’ makes a compelling argument about the way a work of literature has meaning in relation to its readers rather than its author. We twenty-first-century readers of Dickens are not the same people as the Victorians who read his work when its author was alive, for instance. Words change their meanings over time and take on new resonance.

However, we might counter Barthes’ argument by making a couple of points. The first is perhaps an obvious one: that it needn’t be an ‘either/or’ and that the birth of the reader doesn’t necessarily have to be at the cost of the death of the author. We can read Keats’s poems and try to understand what the young Romantic poet meant by his words, what he was trying to say as the author of the work, while also acknowledging the fact that ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ has new resonances for us, two centuries after it was written.

The second point is that viewing a work of literature as a mere ‘tissue of signs’ threatens to put it on the same level as a bus timetable or a telephone directory. They, too, contain nothing but familiar words, names, and numbers, and are not original. Works of literature may (in the main) draw on familiar words and even familiar phrases, but great works of art put these words and ‘signs’ into new combinations – and there is a virtually infinite number of those – which can create new meanings for us.

So we might view the relationship between author, text, and reader as a tripartite partnership rather than bipartite one: all three elements are important in creating the text’s meaning.

If I give a poem to my students and don’t tell them anything about its author, they can analyse the poem’s language and try to determine its meaning; but knowing something about the author and their context may help to reveal new meanings which are important in understanding the text. As soon as we know a poem is by Sylvia Plath, and we can bring the details of her life (and death) to our reading of the poem, its meaning changes.

So we do need to bear in mind who wrote a text and how that might be significant in creating its meaning, even if we also need to acknowledge (as Barthes does) that once a text is written and goes out into the world, it is no longer solely the property of the author who wrote it, but its meaning is also generated by those who read it.

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Reader and Text

English Majors Practising Criticism

The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes, both a structuralist and a poststructuralist over the course of his career, was one of the first to strip the author of a unique role accorded by Western culture and traditional literary criticism. In “The Death of the Author” (1967), Barthes characterized the author not as an original and creative master manipulator of the linguistic system but, rather, as one of its primary vehicles, an agent through which it works out new permutations and combinations. —The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms on “Postructuralism”

They [contemporary semioticians] are especially indebted to Barthes, who in works such as “La mort de l’auteur” (“The Death of the Author”) (1967) and S/Z (1970) pronounced the death of the author; emphasized the role of the reader (or, more precisely, lecture , or reading); and differentiated the lisible (readerly) text (one that provides readers with a world replete with fixed meanings) from more open, scriptible (writerly) text (one that invites readers to create meaning). —The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms on “Structuralist criticism”

At the end of my last blog post titled “Dionysos the Author and Vlepo the Reader,” I spoke briefly about the possible representation of the actual occurrence of an author’s death at the end of Percival Everett’s Frenzy . Throughout that blog post I argued that, in the text, Dionysos shares many traits with an “author” archetype—and, additionally, Vlepo shares many traits with a “reader” archetype. If this analogy stands, I argued that Dionysos’ death by Vlepo’s hand at the end of Frenzy can be viewed as the literal death of the author. And, like the reader finally finishing the novel Frenzy , Vlepo is left alone to do what he will with the knowledge he’s gained. There is no Dionysos to guide him, just like there is no author to guide the reader—what matters, in the end, is the reader’s own interpretation of what they have read, and not what the author’s original intentions might have been. 

In this blog post, however, I would like to thoroughly analyze what the Death of the Author theory means by defining, discussing, and citing relevant examples—and, in so doing, I might arrive at a deeper understanding of how a reader can interact with a piece of text. Before I unpack that, however, I would like to clarify some details of the Death of the Author historically. The theory was first mentioned in Roland Barthes’ essay of the same name (in French, “La mort de l’auteur,” published in 1967). From there, it developed as a facet of structuralist criticism. Structuralism, as defined by The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms , is the “theory of humankind whose proponents attempt to show systematically, even scientifically, that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as a system of signs.” Because the Death of the Author emphasizes the separation of the author’s intention from their work in favor of the reader’s interpretation, it refutes the connectedness of structuralist ideas.

To define Death of the Author more simply, it is the theory that the author’s intention regarding their work before, during, and after writing holds no more weight than any other factor when a reader determines an interpretation of that work. Whether it was intentional or unintentional by the author, what a reader interprets cannot be wrong, even if it does not align with what the author’s idea originally was. Books are ultimately meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers form interpretations are as important and “real” as the author’s intention. However, the Death of the Author is a theory that continues to develop to this day—as media changes and evolves, what the Death of the Author means when it comes to intention and interpretation also changes.

How Death of the Author can be interpreted in the works of Percial Everett, however, is a different matter. In my previous blog post I spoke about Dionysos and Vlepo in Frenzy , but Everett introduces a very different element that may be important to the Death of the Author theory in his book I Am Not Sidney Poitier . In this novel, instead of presenting the blasé, humorous character of Dionysos, he introduces himself as a character—the Professor Percival Everett. While I may do an entirely separate blog post on what Everett is trying to communicate by having “himself” as a character in his novel, for now I will only lightly dissect it as it pertains to the Death of the Author theory.

Should we take what the character Percival Everett says as what the author Percival Everett says? Is not the entire book I Am Not Sidney Poitier “what” Percival Everett is saying, or what he has said, because he was the one to write those words down? This I do not dispute—the book is Percival Everett’s, but how does this relate to the Death of the Author? If the author’s intention does not matter any more than the reader’s own interpretation, does that change if the author inserts themselves into their novel as a character, who shares their name and their personality? All of these questions are highly situational, and may change depending on what book you are reading, but it is an interesting question to ask—and it is a question that Everett may or may not have intended to present by including himself as a character in I Am Not Sidney Poitier .

In the end, the Death of the Author can be defined as the theory that the author’s original intention for their work and that author’s background matter no more than the reader’s own interpretation of that work. What matters is what the reader gains from the story. Before I conclude this blog post, I suggest reading Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” essay for more information. It clearly clarifies how one can separate the text from the author, and provides the best example of the beginnings of the theory. Going forward, I do wish to pay attention to how Percival Everett includes the theory of Death of the Author in his work, but for now I am satisfied with my analysis of both Frenzy and I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author

Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 3 )

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (1968) plays a pioneering role in contemporary theory as it encapsulates certain key ideas of Poststructuralist theory and also marks Barthes’ transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. The title itself, in a rhetorical way announces the liberation of the literary work from authorial-intention and control, an idea foreshadowed in modernism.

Barthes observed that writers like Mallarme, Valerry and Proust have already challenged the centrality of the author. Simultaneous with the author’s death, the reader or the scrip for is born who writes meanings into the text. A deconstructive close reading dismantles the supposed unity and coherence of the text and leads to its explosion into multiplicity of meanings. The author’s demise and the subsequent discarding of the author’s intention, is very much an act of decentering, and it underscores the myth of the transcendental signified. Barthes described writing as a “performative act” and that “every text is written here and now”. A text unity “lies not in its origin, but in its destination”, which is the reader, who according to Barthes, is without “history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”; he is, like the author, a function of the text.

The text is perceived as a multi-dimensional space where a plethora of meanings, with a galaxy of signifiers clash and blend. Barthes further develops this idea in his, S/Z (1970) where he introduces the concept of the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. In his From Work to Text , Barthes distinguishes the “text” from the “work”, as fluid, with many levels of meaning, ranging across disciplinary boundaries, something that is held in “intertextuality” in a network of signifiers. He argues that a text can never convey a single meaning, but is subject to multiple interpretations, not only because the readers are different, but primarily because of the instability of the linguistic sign.

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Death of the Author—Complex Questions and Great Discussions

Death of the author is… complicated. So, to help you understand it more and to highlight different ideas, here are some videos and articles to check out.

Death of the author has become a more and more prevalent idea in recent times, as the ideas of whether an author’s intent or views matter when discussing the text become more relevant to more people. “Death of the Author,” an essay originally written in French by Roland Barthes in 1967, has become the basis for a literary criticism. The whole idea is that you separate the author, what they think about the text, and who they are as a person, from the text itself. Basically, does the author’s interpretation of the text matter any more than a reader’s interpretation? Or, should an author’s views affect whether you enjoy the text or think it’s important to history or literature?

Death of the author introduces a lot of difficult questions and not a lot of simple answers. Some people believe you should completely ignore the author, others think you should take their word as gospel. It’s complicated. So, to help you understand death of the author more and to give different perspectives and ideas about the topic, here are some videos and articles to check out.

1. “ Death of the Author ”   by Lindsay Ellis

In this YouTube video,  Lindsay Ellis  discusses death of the author. She uses  The Fault in Our Stars  by John Green, which, while also being an infamous tearjerker, deals heavily with this concept within the story and without. The idea of death of the author is baked in the plot and the character arcs, and Green himself agrees with the concept—which in itself is a little ‘the author is alive’ because his intent to show death of the author is clear in the book—but Ellis explains this concept very clearly through this example.

Then she and John Green himself collaborate to discuss whether death of the author is really viable in modern life, with social media and brands and public life. Is it even possible to fully divorce text from author? Anything you know about an author will inevitably inform your understanding of the text, whether you are purposefully subscribing to their views of the text or mindfully defying them. Lindsay Ellis’ video covers all these concepts and more in a very informative an engaging discussion on death of the author. Go check it out!

2. “ JK Rowling and Authorial Intent ” by Sarah Z

Sarah Z discusses the idea of death of the author and authorial intent in this interesting video. Authorial intent is basically the opposite of the death of the author, she explains, and if you believe in authorial intent, you believe the author is the only person who gets to decide how the work should be interpreted. If death of the author is on one side of a sliding scale of how should this work be analyzed, authorial intent is on the other.

Sarah focuses more on how authorial intent relates to critical thinking and literary analysis. Under the theory of authorial intent, the author’s word is gospel and nobody else’s matters. This discourages critical thinking, because it says that the way to learn more about these books is not to look closely at the text and analyze, but to ask the author and the author will tell you. It also cultivates the idea that an author can retroactively decide things about the text, and that their decisions, post text, are indisputably true. Death of the author counters that idea, as Sarah explains. This video is a really comprehensive look at authorial intent and the effects that it can have on readers and fans.

3. “ Death of the Author ” on TV Tropes

Yes, really. TV Tropes actually has a very comprehensive article on death of the author. Interestingly, this article connects the concept of death of the author with the… debate about  whether  Shakespeare actually wrote his plays or if some other person wrote them under his name. When you take the stance of authorial intent and give the author sole power in determining how a text should be interpreted, you assume that the author has to be an intellectual, that “works with deep meaning and ideas come only from people who are culturally and philosophically learned, rather than deriving from instinct, observation, creative inspiration, and artistic genius.” So the idea that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have written his plays because of his intellect or his education is a derivation of the idea that an author has to be this brilliant all-knowing genius who has more knowledge and experience with literary analysis than the readers do.

The article also goes into some new questions about what death of the author means. That is, does death of the author mean that all interpretations are equally valid? And even if you don’t take the author’s interpretation as the be-all end-all law, isn’t the author’s interpretation still better than the reader’s? They wrote the work, after all. If they get to decide what’s canon within the text, why should their words be less canon after the fact?

All in all, death of the author is absolutely a confusing and contradictory concept, but this TV Tropes article brings up some interesting questions. Go check it out!

4. “ The Afterlife of the Death of the Author ” by Matthew Sini

This compelling article gets into the nitty-gritty of authorial intent—if the author’s intent doesn’t matter and has no bearing on how a text should be interpreted, can the author be held accountable for harmful or hurtful interpretations of the text? If the author’s interpretation is no more or less important than a reader’s, and the reader’s interpretation is that the text has a hurtful meaning, is the author responsible for that hurt?

But one thing is for sure about the literary criticism death of the author, and this article puts it very well:

We need not succumb to the Great Men of Literature style of interpretation Barthes bemoans in acknowledging the author’s role. Few writers are truly great or geniuses or symbolic of their age. But nihilistically disavowing authorship as a crucial part of the process of myth-making might just be worse. If authorship no longer matters, we may soon find that nothing much matters at all.  

Death of the author is a complicated, complex concept that covers many different ideas, thoughts, and questions. In fact, one person could agree with the idea that the author’s interpretation doesn’t matter while thinking that authors should be held accountable for any hurtful or harmful interpretations someone has of their text. Or someone could think the exact opposite. Or any other combination of the questions asked in this article and elsewhere. There are no simple answers when it comes to death of the author, and that’s the only interpretation of this concept that should be taken as true.

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The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes Summary

French literary critic Roland Barthes first used the phrase “The Death of the Author” in his essay of the same name from 1967. It claims that once a text is published, it loses its connection to the author’s intentions and becomes subject to reader interpretation. This idea challenges the conventional idea that the author is the only authority and interpreter of their work. According to Barthes, the identity and purposes of the author are neither fixed nor knowable, and literature is a synthesis of many voices that transcend individual authorship. According to Barthes, literature is a neutral space where various voices interact and the idea of a single, all-knowing author is questioned. The act of reading becomes crucial in creating meaning from a text along with the reader’s personal experiences, viewpoints, and cultural background.

Table of Contents

The centrality of the author:

Barthes questions the conventional view of the author as a singular, supreme authority in literature. According to Barthes, once an action or narrative is conveyed in writing, it loses its connection to reality and has a symbolic meaning while also losing the author’s voice. He contends that the idea of the author as an original individual endowed with personal genius is a relatively recent development affected by capitalism ideology and the social emphasis given to the individual.

Read More: New Criticism in English Literature

The role of the author’s “person” in contemporary culture, where the author’s background, history, preferences, and passions are frequently given significant weight in comprehending their work, is critiqued by Barthes. He contends that this method, which strives to contextualize the work via the biography of the author, is restrictive and authoritarian since it ignores the variety of voices and influences that a text is shaped by. By arguing that literature should be seen as a synthesis of different voices and interpretations, Barthes challenges the notion that the author’s “person” is the ultimate source of meaning in a work.

According to Barthes, positivism and capitalist ideology have emphasized and solidified the idea of the author as a unique individual with a personal history, tastes, passions, and psychological character, as evidenced by writer biographies, magazine interviews, and modern cultural awareness. He attacks the propensity to attribute a work’s meaning to the author’s character, connecting Baudelaire’s art to his failure as a man, Van Gogh’s work to his insanity, and Tchaikovsky’s work to his vice. This emphasis on the author’s identity is viewed as authoritarian and restricting in terms of comprehending literature.

Read More: The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy

Authors and movements that challenges the authority of the author:

Barthes explores the ways in which certain authors have sought to undermine the author’s authority. Mallarme is mentioned as one of the first to see the necessity of substituting language itself for the author, asserting that it is language which speaks, not the author. Proust is the writer who blurs the lines between the author and the characters. Proust used his work of fiction as inspiration for his life and turned it into a masterpiece. It is said that the surrealist movement challenged conventional ideas of authorship by defying assumed meanings, engaging in automatic writing, and allowing collective writing.

Barthes comparison of Brecht’s concept of “alienation”:

The absence of the author, according to Barthes, is not simply a historical fact or a literary technique but it significantly impacts modern works. He equates this lack of the author to Brecht’s idea of “alienation,” in which the writer becomes a tiny figure at the very edge of the literary stage. This implies that the author is now not the dominant figure in how the work should be understood, but rather is separated and detached.

Read More: Epic Theatre by Bertolt Brecht

Difference between classical texts and modern texts:

The concept of time is one of the main distinctions Barthes draws between classical and modern writings. The concept of time is one of the main distinctions Barthes draws between classical and modern writings. In classical literature, the author is viewed as the book’s past, with the relationship between the book and the author being one of before and after. The book is thought to have been preexisted by the author, who is thought to still have a paternal tie with it. Modern texts, on the other hand, lack any sense of transcendence or antecedence because the author and the book are born at the same time. Writing turns into a performative utterance in which the act of writing itself serves as the content. This contradicts the conventional view of the author as a passionate, suffering character who wrestles to put their ideas on paper.

Writing as a performative act:

The idea of a “original” text or a single, authoritative author, according to Barthes, is a myth, and all writing is ultimately a collage of previously published texts and linguistic elements. Furthermore, Barthes claims that the writer’s job is to negotiate and control the huge vocabulary of language and culture that came before them, not to communicate their own inner thoughts or emotions. He rejects the notion that language has a single, stable meaning and contends that words can only be defined by other words in an infinite cycle of signification. According to Barthes, writing is a continuous process that has neither beginning or conclusion.

Role of the author and the significance of the reader:

According to Barthes, a text with multiple facets lacks an underlying ground or universal meaning that can be understood. Instead, reading is positioned as the locus of writing, and the reader is seen as the one who is aware of the complexity and ambiguity of texts. The reader is a text’s goal, and this is where it finds its cohesiveness. The reader is the location where all of a text’s citations and cultural allusions are gathered, and the reader holds the text’s many threads together. In order to restore the future of writing, Barthes contends that the myth of the author must be disproved and that the reader must emerge at the same time that the author dies.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, we can say that  Barthes creates new approaches for interpreting and interacting with texts by challenging the author’s authority and promoting a reader-centered perspective.  He emphasizes that once written, a text ceases to be the author’s creation, and the reader’s active participation determines the text’s meaning. As Barthes proposes, the death of the author gives the act of reading new life and makes us active participants in the continual constructing of meaning. Barthes’ theories are still relevant today because they serve as a constant reminder that reading is a dynamic, collaborative activity that invites us to delve deeper, ask more probing questions, and get fresh perspectives. We can enter a realm of limitless interpretations and literary adventures by recognizing the author’s death.

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The Social Production of Art pp 117–136 Cite as

The Death of the Author

• Janet Wolff  

33 Accesses

Part of the book series: Communications and Culture

In the essay from which this quotation and the title of this chapter are taken, Barthes supports the modern tendency towards the ‘desacrilization of the image of the Author’ (p. 144) in literature. He argues that the author is a modern figure, created by society as it created the human person more generally. 1 In the case of literature, the idea that the author is dominant, the sole origin and source of authentic meaning of a text, is historically specific, and, moreover, mistaken. As Barthes puts it: ‘… a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (p. 146).

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity of focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author … A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination … The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Barthes 1977, p. 148)

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© 1981 Janet Wolff

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Wolff, J. (1981). The Death of the Author. In: The Social Production of Art. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16517-9_7

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The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes

“The Death of the Author” is an essay written in 1967 by French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes . It is a highly influential and provocative essay (in terms of the various claims it is making) and makes various significant development and changes in the field of literary criticism .

Through this relative short but artistic piece of work, Barthes critiques and shakes up the traditional way of approaching and analysing the text, one that is too author-centric: which is too focused in looking for the intentions of the author and analysing the life and background of the author to unravel the meaning of the text instead of just assessing the content of the text alone.

In the first paragraph, Barthes tries to explain the fundamental idea that he lays forward in his essay through the character of Zambinella taken from Sarrasine, a novella written by Balzac.

Talking about this character, who is actually a castrato (a castrated male) disguised as a woman, Balzac writes, “ It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling. ”

Barthes poses a question of whether it is ever possible to know whose ideas are coming forth in these expressions. Is these the character of that novella speaking? is it the man Balzac speaking with his preconceived knowledge and prejudice of women or is it someone else?

Basically, what Barthes makes us realise as a reader is that one can never find for certain through what a particular character is talking if it is the personal opinion of the author coming through the mouth of that character or someone else.

In the similar fashion of what W.K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley do in their essay titled “ The Intentional Fallacy ”, Barthes also warns the reader to not pay unnecessary attention to neither the life of the author nor the ‘real meaning’ that author was trying to say through his work.

According to Barthes, the intentions of the author are irrelevant. The work isn’t an exact replica of his intentions and in the process of giving words to the thoughts, writer intentionally or unintentionally is involved in a process of meaning-making on which he has not complete control as the author/ writer isn’t a God.

Thus the pursuit of trying to figure out the author’s intentions are a complete distraction and unnecessary as even if the author is alive (which is the not the case several times if the author is dead), one can’t be fully certain if the author is genuine about his intentions.

And, in case even if the author is honestly telling his intentions behind what he has written, there is no guarantee that author was successfully able to depict that in his work, which would not only show a supposed failure but in fact add beauty to the text due to the various possible interpretations that it might offer.

Barthes critiques the idea of ‘ originality ’ and ‘ truth ’ that one associate with the author. This approach of giving excessive authority to the author has various problems. This approach makes us take the biographical approach to read the text.

This approach has two problems, one that it falsely assumes, as discussed above, that one can uncover the intentions of the author. Second, that there is a fixed meaning of the text that one should try to find.

Barthes critiques this by suggesting that one should not see the author as some sort of divine creator who creates the text or meaning out of nothing but sort of a collage maker who is putting together various pre-existing thoughts and ideas in a unique and skilful way.

Barthes says this importance given to the author as an original creator is recent, as in earlier times, like at the time of Greeks, the focus was more on the narrative techniques and how a text is presented and not in its original plot, as the most of the texts were coming from the same mythological stories that were presented in different ways by different authors.

So, therefore, Barthes through this essay shifts the focus from the author to the reader. Barthes is not interested in the ‘ true meaning ’ of the text as according to him there is no such thing. Both the reader and author bring with them preconceived knowledge and ideas that they have of certain things, which definitely affects their reading of the text.

So, there could be as different ways of reading and interpreting a text as there are a number of readers. Barthes states at the end of the essay and rightly so that he is more interested in proclaiming the ‘ birth of the reader ’ than in the death of the author. Barthes essay lays the foundation for various theories like post-modernism and reader-response theory.

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Death of the Author

10 questions

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Who is the modern figure?

Author is NOT a product of

English Empiricism

French Rationalism

Greek Heroism

Personal faith of Reformation

The contemporary culture is tyrannically not centered at

Author's History

Author's Taste

Author's Passion

Author's Critic

To write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality is associated with

Stephen Mallarme

Marcel Proust

James Joyce

In the essay “The Death of the Author”, Barthes argues that

author is important

writing and author are unrelated

writing and author are related

None of the above

The death of the author makes the birth of the __________.

Barthes says that in traditional literary and critical theory, excessive importance has been given to ___________.

Barthes says that a text is made of multiple writings. It is the ___________ who deals with the multiplicity of meanings.

The essay “The Death of the Author” begins with the interpretation of a famous story writer

“The Death of the Author” was published in

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The Death of the Author

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The Phoniness of Literary Criticism

A running theme of the essay, especially prominent in sections two, six, and seven, is that the literary criticism of Barthes’s day was a sham. For Barthes, the critic-emperor has no clothes. He regards literary criticism as an industry that disingenuously elevates the author and the author’s biography to profit from its own authority and prestige by supplying a steady stream of final (but bogus) interpretations of texts. Barthes’s disdain for the practice of critics who interpret texts by what is outside of them is palpable whenever he refers to them.

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Guest Essay

José Andrés: Let People Eat

By José Andrés

Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen.

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

José Andrés is a chef and the founder of World Central Kitchen.

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