The death of the author (Roland Barthes)

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The death of the author (La mort de l'auteur) is an essay on literary theory by the French post-structuralist and semioticist Roland Barthes . An English translation was first published in 1967 in Aspen Magazine , and the French original was published in 1968 in Manteia magazine .

The core thesis of the essay is that the author is of far less importance for literature than previously postulated (namely none at all), and that meaning can be generated entirely by the reader . Barthe's text is a fundamental text for the thesis of the author's death , which left a formative impression on literary studies over the following decades .

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Barthes criticizes traditional biographism , in which the explanation of a work is always centered around the person who created it. For Barthes, writing is the space where the subject disappears, the photographic negative, where all identity is lost, and that begins with the identity of the person who writes.

Barthes develops a short historical sketch of writing and authorship to illustrate this transformation. In the original societies, writing was known for what it is. In the modern , the tyrannical figure of the author developed, and slowly began to return to the original writing by deconstructing the author.

Barthes traces this deconstruction of the author by identifying several attempts to achieve the emancipation of writing from the author. Mallarmé already wrote that it is not the author who speaks but the language. Valéry called the recourse to the inside of the author superstition. Proust blurred the author-figure relationships and called the narrator the one who will write. Finally, in Surrealism , language disappointed expectations and the author was desecrated. Ultimately, however, all these attempts remained a heroic failure that could not dethrone the author. Only linguistics succeeded in replacing the author. She calls every statement an empty process, again the author is only the one who writes. Only with the help of linguistics is it possible to reposition writing where it belongs, in the language itself.

After this deconstruction Barthes calls the modern author a writer ( scripteur ) that arises at the same time as his text , always in the here and now. If the author was primarily the book, what precedes the writer is the text. For Barthes, a text, on the other hand, is a multidimensional space: a web of quotations , so not original. The writer has no passions, feelings or impressions in himself, but the large dictionary from which he draws. Life imitates the book, the book is lost imitation.

The deciphering ( hermeneutical interpretation) of a text becomes unnecessary with the disappearance of the author, since there cannot be an originally intended and only meaning and every act of writing means systematic erasure of meaning.

The place of literature is no longer its source (its author), but rather the reading itself. The text consists of multiple writing, composed of different cultures entering into a dialogue. The multiple writing has to be disentangled but not deciphered. The unity of the text is not created by the figure of the author, but only in the reader. Barthes' final demand is accordingly: "The birth of the reader is to be paid for with the death of the author."

reception

The following year, Michel Foucault gave the lecture What is an Author? who - without naming it explicitly - dealt intensively with Barthes' text. In it he accused Barthes of going too far, on the one hand, by stating that the author was already dead, and, on the other hand, of endowing the text itself or the writer with numerous attributes of the author. As a reaction to this, Barthes himself published Die Lust am Text in 1973 . Both Barthes' and Foucault's text are basic texts for the discussion of the author's death and the return of the author .

expenditure

  • Roland Barthes: La mort de l'auteur. In: Roland Barthes: Le bruissement de la langue . Paris 1984.
  • Roland Barthes: The death of the author. In: Fotis Jannidis , Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez and Simone Winko (eds.): Texts on the theory of authorship . Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 185-193.
  • Roland Barthes: The death of the author. In: Roland Barthes: The noise of language . Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2005 (es 1695), pp. 57-63.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ A b c Adrian Wilson: Foucault on the “Question of the Author”: A Critical Exegesis. In: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 339-363. P. 340
  2. ^ A b Adrian Wilson: Foucault on the “Question of the Author”: A Critical Exegesis. In: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 99, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 339-363. P. 341