The Death of the Author

Throughout Roland Barthes article, “The Death of the Author,” it was stated that the author should not be the main focus when it comes to anything read or written, but the reader should be held at a higher level. Barthes proclaimed this statement at the end of this article, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 877). As we said in class the word Author is capitalized, which means Barthes is referencing a person or better yet the Author is a person. I hope you know where I am going with this because maybe Barthes is proclaiming the Author is more than just a person but the entity that is the writing, “explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as it were always in the end, through the more less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person the author “confining” in us” (Barthes 875). That was the last time he spelt author without a capital letter, which is a shift in the thought process of what an author is.

Barthes also proclaimed that the Author is dead because nothing is original anymore. He says that, “A text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning but a multidimensional 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 centers of culture” (Barthes 876). I think this embodies what Barthes was trying to get across when he said the Author is dead, since there is no original thought being shown to anyone we all become readers regurgitating other things we read in our writing to others.