CCR 720: Barthes (1977) "The Death of an Author"

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image—Music—Text. Trans. and ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977. 142-148.

In his short essay, Barthes criticizes literary analysts for their practice of analyzing and evaluating texts based on the identity of authors, a practice which he views ultimately limits the reading of texts to be a reader’s search of an author’s meanings rather than a reader’s search for his or her own unique understanding. Barthes argues that focusing on the identities of authors also assumes genius (or failures) in the author and ignores that texts are complex recreations of other culturally-driven texts, experiences, and/or common knowledge. Barthes concludes that since there are no real or significant constants coming out of analyses searching for an author’s purpose, connection to, or intended meanings within his or her text, we should recognize instead that a reader’s relationship to a text is in fact the only moment of textual unity. In other words, while the author is the scriber of organized information, readers bring with them their own historical, social, and political context and understandings of texts, thus uniting at once the various strands of information that the author has strung together. These observations lead Barthes to propose that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148).

Quotable Quotes:

· “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture….[T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any of them” (146).

· “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination….[W]e know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148).