The Death of the

Author

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"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort

de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French
literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes
(1915–1980). Barthes's essay 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. The
title is a pun on Le Morte d'Arthur (The
Death of Arthur), a 15th-century
compilation of smaller Arthurian legend
stories, written by Sir Thomas Malory.[1]

The essay's first English-language

publication was in the American journal
Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut
was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968).
The essay later appeared in an anthology
of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text
(1977), a book that also included his "From
Work To Text".

Content
In his essay, the author argues against the
method of reading and criticism that relies
on aspects of the author's identity to distill
meaning from the author's work. In this
type of criticism against which he argues,
the experiences and biases of the author
serve as a definitive "explanation" of the
text. For Barthes, however, this method of
reading may be apparently tidy and
convenient but is actually sloppy and
flawed: "To give a text an author" and
assign a single, corresponding
interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on
that text."

Readers must thus, according to Barthes,

separate a literary work from its creator in
order to liberate the text from interpretive
tyranny (a notion similar to Erich
Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny
in biblical parables).[2] Each piece of
writing contains multiple layers and
meanings. In a well-known passage,
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.

No longer the focus of creative influence,

the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word
Barthes uses expressively to disrupt the
traditional continuity of power between the
terms "author" and "authority"). 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.

Barthes notes that the traditional critical

approach to literature raises a thorny
problem: how can we detect precisely
what the writer intended? His answer is
that we cannot. He introduces this notion
of intention in the epigraph to the essay,
taken from Honoré de Balzac's story
Sarrasine in which a male protagonist
mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls
in love with him. When, in the passage, the
character dotes over his perceived
womanliness, Barthes challenges his own
readers to determine who is speaking, and
about what. "Is it Balzac the author
professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is
it universal wisdom? Romantic
psychology? ... We can never know."
Writing, "the destruction of every voice,"
defies adherence to a single interpretation
or perspective. (Barthes returned to
Sarrasine in his book S/Z, where he gave
the story a rigorous close reading.)

Acknowledging the presence of this idea

(or variations of it) in the works of previous
writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that "it is
language which speaks." He also
recognized Marcel Proust as being
"concerned with the task of inexorably
blurring ... the relation between the writer
and his characters"; the Surrealist
movement for employing the practice of
"automatic writing" to express "what the
head itself is unaware of"; and the field of
linguistics as a discipline for "showing that
the whole of enunciation is an empty
process." Barthes's articulation of the
death of the author is a radical and drastic
recognition of this severing of authority
and authorship. Instead of discovering a
"single 'theological' meaning (the
'message' of the Author-God)," readers of a
text discover that writing, in reality,
constitutes "a multi-dimensional space,"
which cannot be "deciphered," only
"disentangled."

"Refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate

meaning" to text "liberates what may be
called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to
refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse
God and his hypostases—reason, science,
law."[3]

Influences and overview

Ideas presented in "The Death of the
Author" were anticipated to some extent
by New Criticism, a school of literary
criticism important in the United States
from the 1940s to the 1970s. New
Criticism differs from Barthes's theory of
critical reading because it attempts to
arrive at more authoritative interpretations
of texts. Nevertheless, the crucial New
Critical precept of the "intentional fallacy"
declares that a poem does not belong to
its author; rather, "it is detached from the
author at birth and goes about the world
beyond his power to intend about it or
control it. The poem belongs to the
public."[4] Barthes himself stated that the
difference between his theory and New
Criticism comes in the practice of
"disentangling". Barthes's work has much
in common with the ideas of the "Yale
school" of deconstructionist critics, which
numbered among its proponents Paul de
Man and Barbara Johnson in the 1970s,
although they are not inclined to see
meaning as the production of the reader.
Barthes, like the deconstructionists, insists
upon the disjointed nature of texts, their
fissures of meaning and their incongruities,
interruptions, and breaks. A. D. Nuttall's
essay "Did Meursault Mean to Kill the
Arab? The Intentional Fallacy Fallacy"
(Critical Quarterly 10:1–2, June 1968, pp.
95–106) exposes the logical flaws in the
"Intentional fallacy" argument.

Michel Foucault also addressed the

question of the author in critical
interpretation. In his 1969 essay "What is
an Author?", he developed the idea of
"author function" to explain the author as a
classifying principle within a particular
discursive formation. Foucault did not
mention Barthes in his essay but its
analysis has been seen as a challenge to
Barthes's depiction of a historical
progression that will liberate the reader
from domination by the author.

Jacques Derrida paid ironic homage to

Barthes's "The Death of the Author" in his
essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes".[5]
Literary theorist Seán Burke dedicated an
entire book to opposing "The Death of the
Author", pointedly called The Death and
Return of the Author.[6]

J. C. Carlier, in the satirical essay "Roland

Barthes' Resurrection of the Author and
Redemption of Biography" (Cambridge
Quarterly 29:4, 2000, pp. 386–393), argues
that the essay "The Death of the Author" is
the litmus test of critical competence.
Those who take it literally automatically
fail that test; those who take it ironically
and recognize a work of fine satiric fiction
are those who pass the test.

See also
Authorial intent
Postmodernism

References
1. Scala, E. (2002-08-16). Absent
Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and
Literary Structure in Late Medieval
England . ISBN 9780230107564.
2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask.
Princeton, 1953, repr. 1974 "Chapter
1"
3. Roland Barthes's "The Death of the
Author "
4. William Wimsatt and Monroe C.
Beardsley (1946). "The Intentional
Fallacy". Sewanee Review, vol. 54
(1946): 468–488. Revised and
republished in The Verbal Icon:
Studies in the Meaning of Poetry,
 University of Kentucky Press, 1954: 3–
18.
5. "Jacques Derrida – The Deaths of
Roland Barthes" . Scribd. Retrieved
2016-10-04.
. Burke, Seán (2010). The Death and
Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and
Derrida (3 ed.). Edinburgh University
Press. ISBN 978-0748637119.
Barthes, Roland, trans. Richard Miller. S/Z.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
 Barthes, Roland. Susan Sontag, ed. A Barthes
Reader. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Further reading
Content and critical essays
Allen, Graham. Roland Barthes. London:
Routledge, 2003.
Culler, Jonathan. Barthes: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Gane, Mike, and Nicholas Gane, ed.
Roland Barthes. London: SAGE
Publications, 2004.
Hix, H. L. Morte d'Author: An Autopsy.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990.
Knight, Diana. Critical Essays on Roland
Barthes. New York: G.K Hall, 2000.
Kolesch, Doris. Roland Barthes. New
York: Campus, 1997.
Moriarty, Michael. Roland Barthes.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1991.
North, Michael, "Authorship and
Autography," in Theories and
Methodologies. PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5.
(Oct., 2001), pp. 1377–1385.
Context and other post-structuralists
Burke, Séan. The Death and Return of the
Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1998.
Image-Music-Text
Thody, Philip. Book review of Image-
Music-Text, by Roland Barthes; trans.
Stephen Heath. Review in The American
 Journal of Sociology," Vol. 85, No. 6.
(May, 1980), pp. 1461–1463.
Barthes and feminist theory
Walker, Cheryl. "Feminist Literary
Criticism and the Author. Critical Inquiry
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 551–
571.
Flip, illustrated cartoon version
Course, Anne and Philip Thody, ed.
Richard Appignanesi. Barthes for
Beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books,
1997.

External links
 Web documentation of the works
included in the issue of Aspen "Death of
the Author" appeared in, including the full
text of Barthes's essay.
"Copyright and the Death of the Author in
Literature and Law"

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