Neil Bowen on
Key Quotes from Roland Barthes ‘Death of the Author’ (1968)
A text is ‘made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author’.
‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.’
On the Author and the Critic: ‘Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.’
The Death of the Author: ‘Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.’