Death of the Author

1. Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

2. Barthes, Foucault, Gass (l-r) Death of the Author Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142‑48. Foucault, Michael. "What is an Author?" The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101‑20. Gass, William H. ''The Death of the Author." Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. 265‑88. Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

3. According to post-modernist critical theory we are—in Derrida's phrase—"logocentric." Routinely, naively we assume that the sounds uttered by a speaker make manifest precise meanings present within. We take it for granted that the "signifier" of a speaker's language is "but a temporary representation through which one moves to get at the signified, which is what the speaker, in that revealing English phrase, 'has in mind'" (Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 119-20). Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

4. Semiotic inquiry often leads to similar conclusions, as in Umberto Eco's statement of post-modernist faith that "all works are created by works" and "texts . . . created by texts"; "literature comes from literature, cinema comes from cinema" (199). Today's audience (readers or viewers) of "instinctive semioticians" immediately recognizes that "all together they [the archetypes of art] speak to each other independently of the intention of their authors" (210). Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

5. Asa corrective, deconstructionism would eliminate entirely the fiction of a speaking or writing subject. For Derrida, "the author deliquesces into writing-as-such and the reader into reading-as-such, and what writing-as-such effects and reading-as-such engages is not a work of literature but a text, writing, 'ecriture" (Abrams 567). And even though Harold Bloom has taken pains to distinguish his multi-volume analysis of the "anxiety of influence" from the anti-humanism of a Derrida, his thesis that no poet speaks entirely in his or her own voice but rather struggles, always in the end unsuccessfully, to escape the more powerful voice of ancestral poets, obviously contributes to our failing faith in the power of the author and transforms inspiration into a merely inter-textual matter. Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

6. We do much the same with texts. "In primitive societies," Roland Barthes reminds in his essay on "The Death of the Author," "narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose 'performance' may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his 'genius'" (142). In literate societies, however, we have created the whole institution of authorship—largely forgetting, however, that the author is a recent invention. Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

7. Only five centuries ago, Michel Foucault asks us to remember in his essay "What is an Author?", texts now thought of as literary were "accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as sufficient guarantee of their status.” Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

8. "On the other hand," Foucault observes, "those texts that we now call scientific—those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography—were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as 'true,' only when marked with the name of their author. 'Hippocrates said,' 'Pliny recounts,' were not really formulas of an argument based on authority; they were the markers inserted in discourses that were supported to be received as statements of demonstrated truth" (109). Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011

9. William Gass' fine essay on "The Death of the Author" offers a dissenting opinion on Barthes' contention, noting that Barthes' obituary, substituting wish for deed, was premature: "when, in 1968, Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, he was actually calling for it." In Gass' opinion, the death of the author is comic, not tragic; it "signifies a decline in authority, in theological power, as if Zeus were stripped of his thunderbolts and swans, perhaps residing on Olympus still, but now living in a camper and cooking with propane. He is, but he is no longer a god" (265). Death of the Author Studies in Narratology, Summer 2011