Death of the Author
Encyclopedia
The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by the French
literary critic and theorist
Roland Barthes
. 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 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".
Readers must thus 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
parable
s). Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. 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.
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"). 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 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 her. When, in the passage, the character dotes over her 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' 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,' 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."
.
Barthes' work has much in common with the ideas of the "Yale school
" of deconstruction
ist critics, which numbered among its proponents Paul de Man
and Geoffrey Hartman
in the 1970s. Barthes, like the deconstructionists, insists upon the disjointed nature of texts, their fissures of meaning and their incongruities, interruptions, and breaks.
Ideas presented in "The Death of the Author" were anticipated to some extent by the New Criticism
, a school of literary criticism important in the United States
from the 1940s to the 1960s. New Criticism differs from Barthes' 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." Barthes himself stated that the difference between his theory and New Criticism comes in the practices of "deciphering" and "disentangling."
Post-structuralist skepticism about the notion of the singular identity of the self has also been important for some academics working in feminist theory
and queer theory
. These writers find in Barthes' work an anti-patriarchal
, anti-traditional strain sympathetic to their own critical work. They read the "Death of the Author" as a work that obliterates not only stable critical interpretation but also stable personal identity.
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' depiction of a historical progression that will liberate the reader from domination by the author.
Context and other post-structuralists
Image-Music-Text
Barthes and feminist theory
Flip, illustrated cartoon version
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
literary critic and theorist
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
. 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 essay's first English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
-language publication was in the American journal Aspen
Aspen (magazine)
Aspen was a multimedia magazine published on an irregular schedule by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Described by its publisher as "the first three-dimensional magazine," each issue came in a customized box or folder filled with materials in a variety of formats, including booklets, "flexidisc"...
, no. 5-6 in 1967; the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
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, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her 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" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."
Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach
Erich Auerbach
Erich Auerbach was a philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times.-Biography:Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in...
's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
parable
Parable
A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...
s). Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. 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.
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"). 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 in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
's story Sarrasine
Sarrasine
Sarrasine is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1830 , and is part of his Comédie Humaine.-Commentary:...
in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato
Castrato
A castrato is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.Castration before puberty prevents a boy's...
for a woman and falls in love with her. When, in the passage, the character dotes over her 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
S/Z
S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function...
, 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
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, who said that "it is language which speaks." He also recognized Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring…the relation between the writer and his characters"; the Surrealist
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
movement for employing the practice of "automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
" to express "what the head itself is unaware of"; and the field of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
as a discipline for "showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process." Barthes' 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,' 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."
Influences and overview
A post-structuralist text, "Death of the Author" influenced French continental philosophy, particularly that of Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
.
Barthes' work has much in common with the ideas of the "Yale school
Yale school (deconstruction)
The Yale School is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature that were influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction...
" of deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
ist critics, which numbered among its proponents Paul de Man
Paul de Man
Paul de Man was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.He began teaching at Bard College. Later, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1950s...
and Geoffrey Hartman
Geoffrey Hartman
Geoffrey H. Hartman is a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but also has written on a wide range of subjects, and cannot be categorized by a single school or method.-Biography:...
in the 1970s. Barthes, like the deconstructionists, insists upon the disjointed nature of texts, their fissures of meaning and their incongruities, interruptions, and breaks.
Ideas presented in "The Death of the Author" were anticipated to some extent by the New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
, a school of literary criticism important in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
from the 1940s to the 1960s. New Criticism differs from Barthes' 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
Intentional fallacy
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy", a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important...
" 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." Barthes himself stated that the difference between his theory and New Criticism comes in the practices of "deciphering" and "disentangling."
Post-structuralist skepticism about the notion of the singular identity of the self has also been important for some academics working in feminist theory
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
and queer theory
Queer theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
. These writers find in Barthes' work an anti-patriarchal
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
, anti-traditional strain sympathetic to their own critical work. They read the "Death of the Author" as a work that obliterates not only stable critical interpretation but also stable personal identity.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
also addressed the question of the author in critical interpretation. In his 1969 essay "What is an Author?
What is an Author?
What is an Author? is an influential lecture given by French philosopher, sociologist and historian Michel Foucault on literary theoryThe work considers the relationship between author, text and reader; concluding that:...
", 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' depiction of a historical progression that will liberate the reader from domination by the author.
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.H. L. HixHarvey Lee Hix , who signs his work H. L. Hix, is an American poet and academic.Hix is the author of books of poetry, criticism and essays and has been awarded a fellowship from the NEA. He has also won the KCAI Teaching Excellence Award and the T. S...
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.