Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Discuss the interrelationship between spectator/author in response to the following quote “...the birth of
the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (Barthes 1977:148)
Word Count: 1823
Conclusion
The philosopher Alexander Nehamas supports and summarises Foucault's (and
indirectly Barthes) study of the author figure in his essay “What An Author Is” with the
following - “The author is not a person at all, but a “function” or “figure” which emerged, in
connection with literature, only after the Renaissance.” (Nehamas 1986:685).
The spectator looks to the author as a force of guidance to explain or otherwise
rationalise their work. In their minds the author takes on the “function” that Foucault describes
and Nehamas supports. “...it is to ask of them a certain type of question and to expect a certain
type of answer.” (Nehamas 1986:685). With an author present in the equation between spectator
and text he acts as a buffer. “The Author confides in us.” (Barthes 1977:143)
Nehamas introduction to Foucaults way of thinking in “What and Author Is” clearly
states that pinning a work with an author figure with the explicit intention of deciphering its
message and reasoning “is an impossible goal which leads us in the wrong direction.” (Nehamas
1986:685).
Foucault himself states that “It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to
bring out the works relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or
experience, but rather to analyse the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form,
and the play of its internal relationships.” (Foucault 1991:103). Through this he refers directly to
an idea of Barthes introduced a year before in 1968 in the essay “Death of the Author”. The
spectator can only truly understand and question the “tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 1977:146) when the author has 'died', has been
abolished as an entity of worth.
“...the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (Barthes
1977:148)
Bibliography
Atran, S., (1991). 'The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation'
Human Nature 12, 4 (2001) 351-381 - http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/01/
23/ijn_00000123_00/ijn_00000123_00.doc
Barthes, R., (1968). "The Death of the Author", Image, Music, Text (published 1977). Great
Britain: Fontana Press.
Costs of Providing and Using Free Content. 2009. Deloitte Media Predictions 2009. [Online]
Available at: http://www.deloitte.co.uk/TMTPredictions/media/Rising-cost-of-free-online-
content.cfm [accessed 15 April 2009].
Foucault, M., (1969). "What is an Author?", The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's
Thought (published 1984). New York: Pantheon Books.
Nehamas, A., (1986). "What An Author Is", The Journal of Philosophy (Eighty-Third Annual
Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division) 83 (11): 685–691