Death of The Author - Influences and Overview

Influences and Overview

A post-structuralist text, "Death of the Author" influenced French continental philosophy, particularly that of Jacques Derrida.

Barthes' work has much in common with the ideas of the "Yale school" of deconstructionist critics, which numbered among its proponents Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman in the 1970s. Barthes, like the deconstructionists, insists upon the disjointed nature of texts, their fissures of meaning and their incongruities, interruptions, and breaks.

Ideas presented in "The Death of the Author" were anticipated to some extent by the New Criticism, a school of literary criticism important in the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s. New Criticism differs from Barthes' theory of critical reading because it attempts to arrive at more authoritative interpretations of texts. Nevertheless, the crucial New Critical precept of the "Intentional Fallacy" declares that a poem does not belong to its author; rather, "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public." Barthes himself stated that the difference between his theory and New Criticism comes in the practices of "deciphering" and "disentangling."

Post-structuralist skepticism about the notion of the singular identity of the self has also been important for some academics working in feminist theory and queer theory. These writers find in Barthes' work an anti-patriarchal, anti-traditional strain sympathetic to their own critical work. They read the "Death of the Author" as a work that obliterates not only stable critical interpretation but also stable personal identity.

Michel Foucault also addressed the question of the author in critical interpretation. In his 1969 essay "What is an Author?", he developed the idea of "author function" to explain the author as a classifying principle within a particular discursive formation. Foucault did not mention Barthes in his essay but its analysis has been seen as a challenge to Barthes' depiction of a historical progression that will liberate the reader from domination by the author.

Some scholars have rejected Barthes's argument in toto. Camille Paglia, for example, wrote:

Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

Seán Burke dedicated an entire book to opposing "Death of the Author", pointedly called Death and Return of the Author.