32 pages • 1 hour read
Roland BarthesThe Death of the Author
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: May 1968
While the essay is still much read and revered by many critics and scholars today, it is important to read it in the context of its historical moment. The late 1960s was a period of great questioning of authority, particularly by young people. In May 1968, there was a seven-week period of civil uprising in France that included labor strikes and college students protesting the dominant cultural authority of universities and government control over them. Protests targeted various forms of social injustice, but special targets of the student-led movement were capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism (particularly that associated with the United States’ war in Vietnam). Barthes is explicit in his essay that capitalism has much to do with the culture of the individual, which gave rise to the “author” as a source of textual authority. His reference to the “empire of the author”—which his essay clearly tends to overthrow, resonates with the anti-imperialism antiauthoritarianism of popular movements in France and the West at the time.
Literary Context: French Theory
Barthes’s essay is a canonical entry in what is often referred to as “French Theory” in the United States. It refers broadly to a set of ideas that arose in France in the 1960s and 1970s and had a growing impact on American scholars working in a number of fields—sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and especially literary theory. In France, literary theory turned away from what Barthes calls “classical criticism” (which focused on the analysis of authors’ intentions, their biographies, writing styles, and place in the history of French literature) to use new approaches like structuralism and semiotics, which focused on understanding the phenomenon of literature rather than the “explanation” of particular texts and sought stable “structures” that could be found within all kinds of texts.
The most influential branch of French Theory was poststructuralism, which rejected any notion of universal truth or black-and-white meaning that might be derived from the analysis of any text. Barthes ranks high on any list of influential “French Theorists.” In many ways, he was a transitional figure who drew on both structuralism and semiotics in his writing, but who ultimately used them to destroy the idea of stable, reliable meanings. This can be seen in “The Death of the Author,” wherein he applies his notion of “writing” first to literary texts but then quickly expands its application to all texts, even hinting that almost anything can be considered a “text” and that “all origins” are called into question. He writes,
Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors (144-45, emphasis added).
Originally, speech act theory, which he alludes to here and discusses further in Section 4, sought to make clear distinctions between kinds of utterances that were performative (e.g., “I declare war” or “I thee wed,” which cannot be evaluated as either true or false) and other kinds of utterances that are subject to such evaluation. But Barthes really indicates that all textual statements, all instances of “writing,” are performative and that therefore there is no point in speaking of what is “true” or “untrue.” This is poststructuralism in a nutshell.
