Ronald Barhes The Death Of The Author Summary

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The Death of the Author
Ronald Barthes
The death of the author is an essay by Ronald Barthes, a French literary critic. Roland Barthes, in his essay puts forth the concept and various aspects of author, the work, the readers and the originality of the text and to whom the text belongs to. He commences his essay by citing a sentence from Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine- “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling” (The Death of the Author 2). By quoting this he raises some question such as whose voice can it be behind this sentence? The story’s hero who has decided to ignore and pay no heed to the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Or can it be the man Balzac putting forth his personal experience with a philosophy of woman? Or is it Balzac, the author, admitting the literary ideas on feminism? Is it “universal freedom” or the outcome of “romantic psychology”? (2) By putting forth such possibilities Barthes tells us that the reader can never know who the speaker of this particular sentence is. Hence we can conclude that the speaker of …show more content…

Reading and writing go hand in hand. He gives an example of Greek tragedy in order to simplify it. The meanings of the words are taken differently and unilaterally by the characters which lead to a tragic end of the play. But the reader who is regarded is the third person knows the characters and their life as well as the chaos going on. Thus, it is the reader who has the ability to understand both the aspects of a particular situation highlighting the deafness of the characters that are in front of him. Barthes thus ends his essay summarizing the very fact that- “[T]he birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”

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