THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Self-study projectAnna RaichukGroup 402Germanic Philology department

In 1968, the French social and literary

critic, Roland Barthes, pronounced ‘the death of the

author’. What does this the so-called ‘death’ mean?

Furthermore, what is the author that Barthes claims is now dead?

"The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings [...] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them" (R. Barthes)

Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

In his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" Roland Barthes argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.

an author is not simply a "person" but a socially and historically constituted subject.

Following Marx's crucial insight that it is history that makes man, and not, as Hegel supposed, man that makes history, Barthes emphasizes that an author does not exist prior to or outside of language. In other words, it is writing that makes an author and not vice versa.

In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text.

For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:

“To give a text an Author is to impose a

limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the

writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate

meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be

called an anti-theological activity, an

activity that is truly revolutionary since to

refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse

God and his hypostases--reason,

science, law.”

Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny.

In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.

Author and scriptorAuthor and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts.

"The author" is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable.

Author and scriptor No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority").

In place of the author, the scriptor’s only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways.

Author and scriptor The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader.

Author and scriptor Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text.

He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader”.

THANK YOU FOR

ATTENTION