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| Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" | |
|---|---|
| Name | "Death of the Author" |
| Author | Roland Barthes |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Essay |
| Published | 1967 |
| Original publication | Paris |
Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author"
Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay that challenges traditional understandings of authorship and interpretive authority associated with texts by repositioning meaning toward readers and linguistic systems. Emerging amid debates in Paris, the essay intersects with movements and figures across structuralism, post-structuralism, and contemporary criticism, and it provoked responses from scholars, writers, and institutions in Europe and North America.
Barthes wrote during a period marked by intellectual exchanges involving Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Louis Althusser, and amid discussions in journals like Tel Quel and institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure and Collège de France. The essay reflects influences from earlier theorists including Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and dialogues with contemporaneous creators such as Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. It also engages, implicitly, with debates involving literary reviewers and publishers like The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Gallimard, and Faber and Faber.
First delivered as a lecture and then published in French in 1967 in magazines tied to the Nouvelle Critique and translated into English in collections circulated by presses including Hill and Wang, the essay is concise and aphoristic. Barthes structures the piece as a series of claims and examples rather than sustained empirical chapters, invoking writers such as George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, and Stendhal to illustrate his argument. Its form echoes experimental prose found in works by Roland Barthes' contemporaries like Michel Butor and corresponds to theoretical texts by Paul de Man and Tzvetan Todorov.
Barthes asserts that locating meaning in the biographical intentions of an author—figures like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Emily Dickinson—limits the plurality of interpretation and reproduces authorial authority akin to cultural institutions such as Le Monde or The New York Times. He proposes that a text's significance arises from intertextual relations linked to predecessors like Homer, Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and to symbolic systems theorized by Saussure and exemplified in works by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Themes include the decentralization of intention, the valorization of the reader—echoing figures like John Berger and Roland Barthes's own writings—and the framing of the text as a "scriptorium" of citations comparable to the polyphonic practices of Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky in music. Barthes challenges the authority vested in canonical gatekeepers such as Oxford University Press and cultural arbiters like Harper's Magazine.
Initial responses ranged from endorsement to vigorous critique among intellectuals and literary critics: supporters included some linked to Foucault and Derrida's circles, while detractors included defenders of authorial intent in publications like The New Republic and universities such as Harvard University and Oxford University. Novelists like Vladimir Nabokov and scholars tied to New Criticism reacted against Barthes' dismissal of authorial biography, whereas proponents in media studies and cultural studies—associates of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams—found utility in his decentralizing move. Debates occurred in forums including Paris Review, New Statesman, and academic conferences at Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley.
Barthes' essay influenced disciplines and practitioners across literature, film, art, and critical theory: it informed scholarship by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes's readers in North America, and later theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze. Its legacy appears in methodologies used by critics working on authors like Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, and Mary Shelley, and in institutional practices at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and academic programs at Yale University and University of Oxford. It also shaped debates about intellectual property involving entities like UNESCO and publishers including Penguin Books.
Scholars have applied Barthes' thesis to diverse fields: literary criticism addressing texts by James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison; film studies analyzing works by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Stanley Kubrick; and art criticism evaluating practices by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Marina Abramović. Legal theorists and cultural policy analysts referencing Berne Convention and rights regimes debate implications for authorship attribution in digital contexts involving platforms like Google Books and archives such as the British Library. Contemporary adaptations of Barthes' idea appear in reader-response work by scholars linked to Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, and in theoretical engagements by Mikhail Bakhtin-influenced critics.
Category:Essays