(Barthes returned to Sarrasine in his book S/Z, where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.)Īcknowledging the presence of this idea (or variations of it) in the works of previous writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that "it is language which speaks." He also recognized Marcel Proust as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring . We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology?. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. He introduces this notion of intention in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate." Every work is "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader.īarthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressively to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer "a text's unity lies not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience. In a well-known passage, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual experience. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. Readers must thus, according to Barthes, separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in biblical parables). For Barthes, however, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." In this type of criticism against which he argues, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of an author's identity to distill meaning from the author's work. The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text". 5–6 in 1967 the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 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. Barthes's 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. " The Death of the Author" ( French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |