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.
Literary Devices
Amplification
Amplification is a class of rhetorical figures that help expand upon, explain, or extend an idea; most involve some form of repetition. Barthes frequently uses this device, and often ironically. For example, he writes, “The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it…” (145). Here Barthes amplifies his metaphor “nourish” with “exists,” “thinks,” “suffers,” and “lives.” The climax of “lives” in an essay about the metaphorical “death” of the author is ironic. Barthes amplifies a set of false notions that his own essay is designed to refute and cancel out.
Metaphor
Metaphor is the most important rhetorical trope. (A trope is a linguistic device that uses meaning in an altered, unusual, and/or nonliteral way.) Metaphor refers to the descriptive transfer of the characteristics of one thing to another to explain or depict something about it, as in “love is a rose.” Metaphors run throughout the essay, beginning with the title: “Death” of the author as Barthes understands writing is not literal, nor could it be even possible, for there never was an “author.” He refers to belief in the author as “tyrannical” and as a figure falsely believed to exist before the work, “like a father to a child” (technically a simile, which is a metaphor made explicit through words such as “like” or “as”). Metaphor is also important to the essay in that Barthes understands language to be made of nothing but metaphors: Words are arbitrary shapes or sounds with no real connection to the things they stand for, which is one reason it is impossible to find a “final” meaning.
Parallelism
Parallelism is a basic rhetorical figure (a figure is any device that alters the arrangement of words or clauses) wherein multiple sequential clauses or terms use the same grammatical structure. The second sentence of Section 2 concludes with a clever use of parallelism:
As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins (142).
The last four phrases are in parallel, but the first one (“this disconnection occurs”) and the last (“writing begins”) are intransitive (i.e., they take no object), while the middle two are transitive (“origin” is the transitive object of “loses,” and “death” is the transitive object of “enters.”) Thus, Barthes walls phrases that “act on reality” between two phrases that exemplify the “intransitive” nature of writing. Barthes uses parallelism here to suggest that ultimately all phrasing, all communication, is “writing” (écriture).
