Work

La mort de l'auteur

The Death of the Author

Language
Year
1967
Country
France
Genre
Nonfiction / Essays / Treatise
La mort de l'auteur
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980), which spawned a literary theory of the same name. Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
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