Death of the Author

On pages 88-90 in Ede and Lunsford's text, you'll find a discussion of Roland Barthes' essay "Death of the Author" and Michel Foucault's concept of the "Author Function," taken from his essay "What is an author?"

I'll use this blog post to add some context to the discussion of Barthes. (In an earlier post, you'll find information about Foucault's "Author Function."


These excerpts are taken from Roland Barthes well-known essay "Death of the Author." THe first excerpt is from the opening of the essay, the last two are from the last two paragraphs.



In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

....

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined, along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.

…..

Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Class Notes 4/6

I'll use the following notes to organize our class discussion. They are based on Lisa Ede's and Andrea Lunsford's Singular Texts/Plural Authors:Perspectives on Collaborative Writing .


The Author: A Preliminary Definition

First, work with a partner to define the term "author." What is an author; how does "author" differ from "writer"? What sorts of texts do authors write? There are many texts in our world to which no authorship is attributed. Please list a few.

We'll put your responses in this space:

Authorship as recent cultural construct:

Ede and Lunsford note that “…the concept of individual authorship, which strikes most people as commonsensical but also somehow inevitable, is actually a cultural construct, and a recent one at that" (77).

What does it mean to say that authorship is a construct? If this is so, what are the implications of this idea?




Take a look at p. 82. You'll see Ede and Lunsford cite a definition of a book circa 1753:

Book, either numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writer; or a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc.. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this book before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the paper maker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the book binder, sometimes even the gilder and brass-woer, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture (Zinck col. 442, cited in and trans by Woodmansee, "Genius" 425).

Based on the above quotation, what can you infer about the "commonsensical" view of authorship in the 18th century?


So how did ideas of authorship change?


On copyright laws and intellectual property:

Before copyright laws could seem not only just but inevitable, society had to accept the idea that there is a crucial distinction between the production of literary texts and, say the raising and selling of apples and that the writer’s role in creating a book is somehow privileged—different from that of the printer or the bookbinder (82).



Those opposed to the establishment of copyright laws did so on two main grounds: (1) a book, being a physical object, becomes the publisher’s property (and then the buyer’s) once it is purchased from the writer; and (2), ideas, once expressed, belong to all, not just to the person who first articulated them (83).

The Printing Press:

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Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press around 1440. Over time, this technology was improved. Whereas early manuscripts needed to be transcribed by hand, the press made reproduction available on a mass scale.

Illuminated Manuscript and Printing Press

Two videos about the book. The first one is funny.






Here's a short documentary regarding the rise of the printing press. It's available via our library's Films on Demand database. I've set up a URL but if it doens't work, just go to the database and search "Printing Press."

http://digital.films.com/play/FMEN4T

Based on what you've seen, what role did the printing press and copyright laws play in the development of the modern concept of "authorship." How does this concept differ from medieval or renaissance concepts of the the author?

Romanticism and the Solitary Author

This painting is by Casper David Friedrich (oil on canvas, 37.3 in × 29.4 in, 1818).
Take a moment to study it. What does the painting have to say about authorship and creativity?

Wordsworth and other’s descriptions of the author’s responsibility and achievement guaranteed a privileged place for both authors and their creations: “Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objection which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown (85).

What role does Descartes play in this story?

Take a look at the top of page 79 (top) and page 89 (middle). It seems pretty clear that Descartes' ideas, particularly the oft-referenced idea cogito ergo sum, are important to the development of contemporary ideas of authorship. Take a moment to review the material on the above pages; write a sentence in which you explain the the significance of Descartes to the definition of authorship.

Foucault's Author Function

Here's a useful link regarding the "author function"