Analysis Of Roland Barthes 'Death Of The Author'

Roland Barthes:: The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” is a seminal text in literary theory. Published in 1967 in France it had a long lasting influence on literary studies, in particular with regard to ideas of semoitics and logocentric conceptions of meaning and authorship. The text makes a fundamental claim about the nature of literary production, as well as the way in which a text may be related to by those who are its readers. Indeed, the essay can be seen to focus on the relation and disjunction between the writer and the reader, and between the reader and the text. This paper will begin by identifying the specific claims which Barthes makes in relation to the nature of authorship, and will then go on to

For Barthes, the lack of a possibly delineated origin is an ontological fact of the act of narration, and one that must be seen to have effects for both the author of a text and for its reader. With regard to the author, he writes: “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself...the voice loses its origin and the enters into his own death...” (1993, 142). According to this argument, existence in the world is predicated on the use of particular signs and communication within the world is predicated on the using such signs in order to alter or interact with reality. The subject that writes or engages in literary narration effectively sunders itself from such an action orientated engagement and, as such, can no longer be said to exist in the moment of writing. In this sense, the act of literary narration, as an act which is no longer connected to the world, is literally an act of

Indeed, this attempt to reinvigorate agency by destroying it can be seen to be one of the text's central contradiction. While the move made here may often be interpreted as making an argument for the impossibility of assigning a fixed meaning to anything in particular, it is also just as possible to demonstrate that Barthes' enables the assignment of meaning to any literary text, but that it seeks to empower the reader as an active, rather than as a passive agent. As the new assigner of meaning, or as the new keystone for literary interpretation, the reader is now an active and empowered