evaluate roland barthes essay death of the author

A Summary and Analysis of Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Death of the Author’ is an influential 1968 essay by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. But what does Barthes mean by ‘the death of the author’? This important short essay was crucial in the development of poststructuralist literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s, as many English departments, especially in the United States, adopted Barthes’ ideas (along with those of other thinkers such as Jacques Derrida).

Let’s take a closer look at Barthes’ argument in this essay. You can read ‘The Death of the Author’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of it.

‘The Death of the Author’: summary

Barthes begins ‘The Death of the Author’ with an example, taken from the novel Sarrasine by the French novelist Honore de Balzac. Quoting a passage from the novel, Barthes asks us who ‘speaks’ those words: the hero of the novel, or Balzac himself? If it is Balzac, is he speaking personally or on behalf of all humanity?

Barthes’ point is that we cannot know . Writing, he boldly proclaims, is ‘the destruction of every voice’. Far from being a positive or creative force, writing is, in fact, a negative, a void, where we cannot know with any certainty who is speaking or writing.

Indeed, our obsession with ‘the author’ is a curiously modern phenomenon, which can be traced back to the Renaissance in particular, and the development of the idea of ‘the individual’. And much literary criticism, Barthes points out, is still hung up on this idea of the author as an individual who created a particular work, so we speak of how we can detect Baudelaire the man in the novels of Baudelaire the writer. But this search for a definitive origin or source of the literary text is a wild goose chase, as far as Barthes is concerned.

He points out that some writers, such as the nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, have sought to remind us, through their works, that it is language which speaks to us, rather than the author. The author should write with a certain impersonality: writing is done by suppressing the author’s personality in order to let the work be written.

Moving away from our traditional idea of ‘the Author’ (Barthes begins to capitalise the word as if to draw a parallel with a higher entity, like God) can help us to see the relationship between writer and text in new ways. In the traditional view, the author is like a parent, who conceives the text rather as a parent conceives a child. The author thus exists before the novel or poem or play, and then creates that literary work.

But in Barthes’ radical new way of viewing the relationship between the two, writer and text are born simultaneously, because whenever we read a literary work we are engaging with the writer here and now , rather than having to go back (to give our own example) four hundred years to consider Shakespeare the Renaissance ‘author’. ‘Shakespeare’, as writer, exists now, in the moment we read his works on the page in the twenty-first century.

Writing is a performative act which only exists at the moment we read the words on the page, because that is the only moment in which those words are actually given meaning – and they are given their meaning by us, who interpret them.

Instead, then, we should think of not ‘the Author’ but ‘the scriptor’ (Barthes used the French scripteur in his original essay, a rare French term which means, essentially, ‘copyist’). We shouldn’t view a work of literature as a kind of secular version of a sacred text, where the ‘Author’ is a God who has imbued the text with a single meaning.

Instead, the literary text is a place where many previous works of literature ‘blend and clash’, a host of influences and allusions and quotations. Indeed, ‘none of them’, Barthes asserts, is ‘original’. Instead, the text is ‘a tissue of quotations’.

Barthes concludes ‘The Death of the Author’ by arguing that imposing an Author on a text actually limits that text, because we have to view the literary work in relation to the author who wrote it. Its meaning must be traced back to the person who produced it.

But writing, for Barthes, doesn’t work like that: it’s a ‘tissue of signs’ which only have meaning when the reader engages with them. The meaning of a text lies ‘not in its origin but in its destination’, and that in order for the reader of the text to exist and have meaning as a term, we must do away with this idea that the author determines the meaning of the text.

‘The Death of the Author’: analysis

‘The Death of the Author’ makes several bold but important claims about the relationship between author and literary text: that works of literature are not original; and that the meaning of a work of literature cannot be determined simply by looking to the author of that work. Instead, we as readers are constantly working to create the meaning of a text.

Writing is ‘the destruction of every voice’ – not the creation of a voice, which is how we tend to think of a creative art such as writing. The literary text is not original, either: indeed, every text is a ‘tissue of quotations’.

This may strike us as Barthes overplaying his hand – surely works of literature contain original thoughts, phrases, and ideas, and aren’t literally just a string of quotations from existing works? – but Barthes is interested in language throughout ‘The Death of the Author’, and it’s true that in every work of literature the words the author uses, those raw materials through which meaning is created, are familiar words, and therefore not original: merely put together in a slightly new way.

(A notable exception is in the nonsense works of Lewis Carroll, whose ‘ Jabberwocky ’ does contain a whole host of original words; but part of the fun is that we recognise this poem as the exception, rather than the normal way works of literature generate their meaning.)

‘The Death of the Author’ was a bold and influential statement, but its argument had numerous precursors: his emphasis on impersonality, for instance, had already been made almost half a century earlier by T. S. Eliot, in his 1919 essay ‘ Tradition and the Individual Talent ’, although Eliot still believed in the poet as an important source of the written text.

And in the mid-twentieth century, New Criticism, particularly in the United States, argued that the text had meaning in isolation, separate from the author who produced it, and that searching for authorial intention in the work of literature was something of a red herring.

‘The Death of the Author’ makes a compelling argument about the way a work of literature has meaning in relation to its readers rather than its author. We twenty-first-century readers of Dickens are not the same people as the Victorians who read his work when its author was alive, for instance. Words change their meanings over time and take on new resonance.

However, we might counter Barthes’ argument by making a couple of points. The first is perhaps an obvious one: that it needn’t be an ‘either/or’ and that the birth of the reader doesn’t necessarily have to be at the cost of the death of the author. We can read Keats’s poems and try to understand what the young Romantic poet meant by his words, what he was trying to say as the author of the work, while also acknowledging the fact that ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ has new resonances for us, two centuries after it was written.

The second point is that viewing a work of literature as a mere ‘tissue of signs’ threatens to put it on the same level as a bus timetable or a telephone directory. They, too, contain nothing but familiar words, names, and numbers, and are not original. Works of literature may (in the main) draw on familiar words and even familiar phrases, but great works of art put these words and ‘signs’ into new combinations – and there is a virtually infinite number of those – which can create new meanings for us.

So we might view the relationship between author, text, and reader as a tripartite partnership rather than bipartite one: all three elements are important in creating the text’s meaning.

If I give a poem to my students and don’t tell them anything about its author, they can analyse the poem’s language and try to determine its meaning; but knowing something about the author and their context may help to reveal new meanings which are important in understanding the text. As soon as we know a poem is by Sylvia Plath, and we can bring the details of her life (and death) to our reading of the poem, its meaning changes.

So we do need to bear in mind who wrote a text and how that might be significant in creating its meaning, even if we also need to acknowledge (as Barthes does) that once a text is written and goes out into the world, it is no longer solely the property of the author who wrote it, but its meaning is also generated by those who read it.

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“The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes: A Critique

“The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, first published in 1967 in the collection “Image Music Text,” translated by Stephen Heath in 1977, is a seminal essay in literary theory.

Introduction: “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

Table of Contents

“The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, first published in 1967 in the collection “Image Music Text,” translated by Stephen Heath in 1977, is a seminal essay in literary theory. Barthes challenges the traditional notion of the author as the sole source of meaning in a text, arguing that the reader plays an equally important role in interpreting and creating meaning. He asserts that the author’s intentions and biographical context are irrelevant to understanding a work, and instead emphasizes the plurality of interpretations that a text can generate. This essay has had a profound impact on literary studies, shifting the focus from authorial intention to reader response and paving the way for post-structuralist and deconstructionist approaches to literature.

Summary of “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

Destruction of Authorial Voice: Barthes illustrates through Balzac’s Sarrasine that the origin of narrative voice is indeterminable—whether it’s the character, the author, or a broader philosophical voice. This exemplifies his thesis that writing neutralizes the voice and its origin, emphasizing the impersonality and composite nature of the text.
Historical Shift in Authorship Concept: The author as a central figure in narrative and interpretation is a modern construct influenced by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the Reformation. The prestige of the individual or “human person” grew during these periods, reinforcing the author’s prominence in literature and criticism.
Criticisms of Traditional Author-Centric Criticism: Barthes critiques the conventional literary criticism that ties a work’s meaning too closely to the author’s personal life and intentions. He argues that such approaches limit the interpretation of texts by imposing a singular, definitive meaning.
Shift from Author to Language: Influential writers like Mallarmé and Valéry have shifted focus from the author to the language itself. Mallarmé posited that it is language that speaks, not the author, promoting a view where writing supersedes authorial intention.
Modern Scriptors versus Traditional Authors: Barthes contrasts the “modern scriptor” who is born simultaneously with the text and whose identity is intrinsically linked to the act of writing, against the traditional notion of an author who precedes and informs the text.
Text as a Multi-dimensional Space: The text is seen as a multi-dimensional space where various writings blend and clash without any originality. It is a fabric of quotations, making the text a product of cultural intertextuality rather than a creation of a single author.
Role of the Reader: In the absence of the author, the focus shifts to the reader, who becomes the central figure in interpreting texts. The reader creates the unity of the text by synthesizing its multiple writings, making interpretation a personal and subjective act.
Critique of Author-Centric Humanism: Barthes argues that traditional humanism, which emphasizes the author, paradoxically neglects the rights and the role of the reader in interpreting texts. The “death of the author” is necessary to liberate the reader and enable a fuller experience of the text, fostering a revolutionary activity that challenges traditional interpretations and meanings.

Literary Terms in “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

Contribution of “the death of the author” by roland barthes to literary theory.

· Decentralizing the Authorial Authority: Barthes argues that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.” This concept disrupts traditional notions of authorship by removing the author from the center of textual interpretation, promoting a view where the text exists independently of the author’s intentions.

· Elevating the Role of Language: He asserts that “it is language which speaks, not the author.” This shifts the focus from the author as the creator to language itself as the force behind the text, thereby enhancing the study of linguistics and semiotics within literary theory.

· Promoting Reader-Centered Criticism: Barthes challenges the conventional reader-author relationship by stating, “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost.” This shifts the interpretative power from the author to the reader, encouraging a more active and personalized engagement with texts.

· Reconceptualizing Textual Origin and Unity: He introduces the idea that a text does not have a single, unified meaning but is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” This concept has influenced poststructuralist theories by emphasizing the intertextuality and the layered complexities within texts.

· Challenging the Author-Centric Literary Tradition: Barthes critiques the historical and cultural construction of the author figure by claiming, “The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions.” His theory calls for a reevaluation of how literary histories and criticisms are formulated.

· Foundational for Poststructuralism : The idea that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” is foundational in poststructuralist thought, where the interpretation of a text is seen as an open-ended, decentralized process that challenges the fixed meanings and authoritative assertions traditionally associated with authorship.

· Influencing Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: Barthes’ essay has been instrumental in developing modern literary criticism and theory, particularly influencing areas like deconstruction, reader-response theory, and cultural studies by advocating for a more democratic approach to understanding texts.

Examples of Critiques: “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

Criticism against “the death of the author” by roland barthes.

Neglecting Authorial Intent : Critics argue that Barthes’ claim that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” excessively diminishes the role of the author’s intentional influence on a text, potentially ignoring how personal context and authorial purpose shape literary works.
Oversimplification of Textual Analysis: By asserting that “a text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” Barthes may oversimplify the complexity of textual creation and interpretation, reducing all texts to mere assemblies of pre-existing discourses without originality.
Undermining the Historical and Cultural Context: The removal of the author might lead to the neglect of the historical and cultural contexts in which a text was produced. This view is encapsulated in Barthes’ statement that “the author is never more than the instance writing,” which critics argue could detach the text from its deeper social, historical, and political meanings.
Practical Limitations in Literary Studies: Barthes’ idea that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” challenges the practical application of author-centered research, which is vital in understanding genre developments, historical influences, and biographical interpretations in literary studies.
Ambiguity in Reader-Centric Approach: While emphasizing the reader’s role in interpretation, Barthes arguably underestimates the need for a structured approach to reading. His focus on the reader as the central figure might lead to excessively subjective interpretations, where “the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced,” potentially causing a lack of clarity and consensus in literary analysis.
Potential for Relativism: The statement that “the reader is without history, biography, psychology” could promote a form of interpretive relativism where texts may be understood in infinitely varied ways, challenging the establishment of any coherent or shared meanings.
Impact on Literary Standards: Barthes’ ideas might challenge traditional standards of literary value and criticism, as removing the author could also diminish the criteria for evaluating the literary quality and impact of texts, given that “writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’.”

Extracts with Explanation from “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes

1967: The Birth of "The Death of the Author" (Author-final version as archived at University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy)

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Home › Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author

Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 3 )

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (1968) plays a pioneering role in contemporary theory as it encapsulates certain key ideas of Poststructuralist theory and also marks Barthes’ transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. The title itself, in a rhetorical way announces the liberation of the literary work from authorial-intention and control, an idea foreshadowed in modernism.

Barthes observed that writers like Mallarme, Valerry and Proust have already challenged the centrality of the author. Simultaneous with the author’s death, the reader or the scrip for is born who writes meanings into the text. A deconstructive close reading dismantles the supposed unity and coherence of the text and leads to its explosion into multiplicity of meanings. The author’s demise and the subsequent discarding of the author’s intention, is very much an act of decentering, and it underscores the myth of the transcendental signified. Barthes described writing as a “performative act” and that “every text is written here and now”. A text unity “lies not in its origin, but in its destination”, which is the reader, who according to Barthes, is without “history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”; he is, like the author, a function of the text.

The text is perceived as a multi-dimensional space where a plethora of meanings, with a galaxy of signifiers clash and blend. Barthes further develops this idea in his, S/Z (1970) where he introduces the concept of the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. In his From Work to Text , Barthes distinguishes the “text” from the “work”, as fluid, with many levels of meaning, ranging across disciplinary boundaries, something that is held in “intertextuality” in a network of signifiers. He argues that a text can never convey a single meaning, but is subject to multiple interpretations, not only because the readers are different, but primarily because of the instability of the linguistic sign.

The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes Summary

French literary critic Roland Barthes first used the phrase “The Death of the Author” in his essay of the same name from 1967. It claims that once a text is published, it loses its connection to the author’s intentions and becomes subject to reader interpretation. This idea challenges the conventional idea that the author is the only authority and interpreter of their work. According to Barthes, the identity and purposes of the author are neither fixed nor knowable, and literature is a synthesis of many voices that transcend individual authorship. According to Barthes, literature is a neutral space where various voices interact and the idea of a single, all-knowing author is questioned. The act of reading becomes crucial in creating meaning from a text along with the reader’s personal experiences, viewpoints, and cultural background.

Table of Contents

The centrality of the author:

Barthes questions the conventional view of the author as a singular, supreme authority in literature. According to Barthes, once an action or narrative is conveyed in writing, it loses its connection to reality and has a symbolic meaning while also losing the author’s voice. He contends that the idea of the author as an original individual endowed with personal genius is a relatively recent development affected by capitalism ideology and the social emphasis given to the individual.

Read More: New Criticism in English Literature

The role of the author’s “person” in contemporary culture, where the author’s background, history, preferences, and passions are frequently given significant weight in comprehending their work, is critiqued by Barthes. He contends that this method, which strives to contextualize the work via the biography of the author, is restrictive and authoritarian since it ignores the variety of voices and influences that a text is shaped by. By arguing that literature should be seen as a synthesis of different voices and interpretations, Barthes challenges the notion that the author’s “person” is the ultimate source of meaning in a work.

According to Barthes, positivism and capitalist ideology have emphasized and solidified the idea of the author as a unique individual with a personal history, tastes, passions, and psychological character, as evidenced by writer biographies, magazine interviews, and modern cultural awareness. He attacks the propensity to attribute a work’s meaning to the author’s character, connecting Baudelaire’s art to his failure as a man, Van Gogh’s work to his insanity, and Tchaikovsky’s work to his vice. This emphasis on the author’s identity is viewed as authoritarian and restricting in terms of comprehending literature.

Read More: The Intentional Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy

Authors and movements that challenges the authority of the author:

Barthes explores the ways in which certain authors have sought to undermine the author’s authority. Mallarme is mentioned as one of the first to see the necessity of substituting language itself for the author, asserting that it is language which speaks, not the author. Proust is the writer who blurs the lines between the author and the characters. Proust used his work of fiction as inspiration for his life and turned it into a masterpiece. It is said that the surrealist movement challenged conventional ideas of authorship by defying assumed meanings, engaging in automatic writing, and allowing collective writing.

Barthes comparison of Brecht’s concept of “alienation”:

The absence of the author, according to Barthes, is not simply a historical fact or a literary technique but it significantly impacts modern works. He equates this lack of the author to Brecht’s idea of “alienation,” in which the writer becomes a tiny figure at the very edge of the literary stage. This implies that the author is now not the dominant figure in how the work should be understood, but rather is separated and detached.

Read More: Epic Theatre by Bertolt Brecht

Difference between classical texts and modern texts:

The concept of time is one of the main distinctions Barthes draws between classical and modern writings. The concept of time is one of the main distinctions Barthes draws between classical and modern writings. In classical literature, the author is viewed as the book’s past, with the relationship between the book and the author being one of before and after. The book is thought to have been preexisted by the author, who is thought to still have a paternal tie with it. Modern texts, on the other hand, lack any sense of transcendence or antecedence because the author and the book are born at the same time. Writing turns into a performative utterance in which the act of writing itself serves as the content. This contradicts the conventional view of the author as a passionate, suffering character who wrestles to put their ideas on paper.

Writing as a performative act:

The idea of a “original” text or a single, authoritative author, according to Barthes, is a myth, and all writing is ultimately a collage of previously published texts and linguistic elements. Furthermore, Barthes claims that the writer’s job is to negotiate and control the huge vocabulary of language and culture that came before them, not to communicate their own inner thoughts or emotions. He rejects the notion that language has a single, stable meaning and contends that words can only be defined by other words in an infinite cycle of signification. According to Barthes, writing is a continuous process that has neither beginning or conclusion.

Role of the author and the significance of the reader:

According to Barthes, a text with multiple facets lacks an underlying ground or universal meaning that can be understood. Instead, reading is positioned as the locus of writing, and the reader is seen as the one who is aware of the complexity and ambiguity of texts. The reader is a text’s goal, and this is where it finds its cohesiveness. The reader is the location where all of a text’s citations and cultural allusions are gathered, and the reader holds the text’s many threads together. In order to restore the future of writing, Barthes contends that the myth of the author must be disproved and that the reader must emerge at the same time that the author dies.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, we can say that Barthes creates new approaches for interpreting and interacting with texts by challenging the author’s authority and promoting a reader-centered perspective. He emphasizes that once written, a text ceases to be the author’s creation, and the reader’s active participation determines the text’s meaning. As Barthes proposes, the death of the author gives the act of reading new life and makes us active participants in the continual constructing of meaning. Barthes’ theories are still relevant today because they serve as a constant reminder that reading is a dynamic, collaborative activity that invites us to delve deeper, ask more probing questions, and get fresh perspectives. We can enter a realm of limitless interpretations and literary adventures by recognizing the author’s death.