Death of the author
The death of the author is a concept represented in literary theory, particularly post-structuralist , which casts doubt on the classic idea of the writer's complete control over his own creation. For text interpretation, this approach means above all that the presumed intention of the author is irrelevant and that texts can also develop meanings that contradict the author's intention.
overview
The basic text of this theory is Roland Barthes ' essay The Death of the Author (1968), another of Michel Foucault's What is an Author? (1969). Related positions can already be found in the poetics of modernism, in Anglo-American New Criticism and in Umberto Eco's semiotic theory ( Opera aperta , 1962; German: The open work of art , 1973). The implications of the neo-critical and the (post-) structuralist view of literature (also known in France as nouvelle critique ) are different, but they have the same thrust. In both cases it was directed against the approach of literary scholarship, which had prevailed since the 19th century, of interpreting texts primarily in connection with the author's biography, and against psychological readings such as those propagated by IA Richards in England . According to this conventional view (especially in the succession of Hobbes and the romantic genius idea), the author was not only the author of a text, but also the authority that determined its meaning, and this original meaning had to be reconstructed if necessary also about author-biographical clues.
The author-oriented reading opposes this concept with a purely text-based interpretation and thus increases the reader and his interpretative skills to become a meaningful authority in the meaning process. Barthes has the formulation that the “death of the author” only enables the “birth of the reader”.
Barthes, Foucault and the deconstruction
Roland Barthes is considered to be the originator of the catchphrase that he coined in 1968 in an essay on Honoré de Balzacs Sarrasine . In the further discussion, especially with the texts of Proust , Valéry and Mallarmé , he rejects the traditional view of the author as a meaningful authority. It is to be replaced by the “scriptor”, an author function that only comes into being in the reading and thus in the text itself - not as a transcendent guarantee of meaning, but as a rhetorical function composed of heterogeneous quotations, allusions and discursive cultural practices that resembles a classic narrator instance.
Foucault's approach is less radical. The essay What is an Author? initially opposes a common metonymic procedure in the history of science to replace theoretical positions with the names of their representatives ("Darwin" instead of The Origin of Species ), which runs the risk of historiography degenerating into the "biography of great men". He sees another danger posed by the dialectic of man and work: The author authority arises from the fact that a number of writings have the same name; conversely, however, almost every text becomes a “work” if it only bears an authoritative name. Nevertheless, Foucault does not rule out the sensible use of an author instance: It serves to mark “large discursive units” and is itself such a discourse that is subject to various historical and cultural changes, but is also particularly closely interlinked with that of property : “A Private letters can have a scribe, but they have no author; a contract can have a guarantor but no author. [...] The function of author is thus characteristic of the existence, dissemination and functioning of certain discourses in a society. "
reaction
A countermovement emerged in a series of publications on the return of the author .
literature
- Roland Barthes: The death of the author . In: Fotis Jannidis (Ed.): Texts on the theory of authorship . Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-15-018058-9 (first published in 1967).
- Umberto Eco: The open work of art . Frankfurt (Main) 1973, ISBN 3-518-07355-9 (Created 1962).
- Umberto Eco: Lector in fabula . Munich (inter alia) 1987, ISBN 3-423-30141-4 (created 1979).
- Michel Foucault: What is an author? In: Michel Foucault (ed.): Writings on literature . Frankfurt (Main) 2003, ISBN 3-518-29275-7 (Created 1969).