The Death of the Author

The concept of ‘the Death of the Author’ was proposed by, French philosopher and literary theorist, Roland Barthes in his essay with the same title. He proposed a paradigm shift in the way that authorship should be viewed by the ‘Critic’. In opposition to the classical model of critique, Barthes proposed that the focus should be on the readers experience and interpretation; he proposed the idea of ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. Rather than focusing on the author’s intent, his or her past building up to the text and the singularity of his or her intent, he suggested that once a text has been committed to written words it transcends into a ‘tissue of signs’ and ‘immense dictionary from which he [the writer] draws a writing that can know no halt’ [Barthes 1977, 147] and the only thing of importance to the critique of the work would be the experience of the reader. He proposed that ‘the work’ itself is merely a string of words that, without a reader, would be void of meaning. He also suggests that these two polar opposites were mutually exclusive of one another and that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ [Barthes 1977, 148]. The discussion that follows will be based on Stephen Heath’s French-to-English translation of Barthes work from the compilation of essays, ‘Image – Music – Text’, translated and compiled in 1977 (three years before Roland Barthes’ death).

Although Barthes spoke mainly of literature (or ‘writing’, as he clarifies, to avoid the connotations that literature had [Barthes 1977, 147]), he also discusses music in his essay entitled ‘Musica Practica’ [Barthes 1977, 149-154] and his theories can be extended to all art forms.

Roland Barthes was a structuralist (and indeed, by some,...

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...eas were presented by Barthes, we now commonly accept that a text, or a piece of music, is not simply a series of words, or musical motifs, releasing a single theological meaning but has the potential for a multidimensional space giving place to multiple meanings of equal validity.

References

Allen, Graham, Roland Barthes {??????????}

Barthes, Roland, 1977: “The Death of the Author” from “Image – Music – Text” (translation by Stephen Heath)

Barthes, Roland, 1977: “Musica Practica” from “Image – Music – Text” (translation by Stephen Heath)

Barthes, Roland, 2006: “Operation Margarine” from “Media and Cultural Studies” (collected by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner)

Barthes, Roland, 1975: “S/Z” (translation by Richard Miller)

Kiremidjian, David, 1985: “A study of modern parody: James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus”