Analyze "The Death of the Author"

Question: Analyze "The Death of the Author" as an essay, which support post structuralist view of author.

Answer: "the Death of the Author" is an essay written by Ronald Barthes. He is one of the post- structuralist. Post structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s. The two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. "The Death of the Author"(1968) which is the turning point, round which Barthes turns from structuralism to post structuralism.

By the mid 20th century, there were a number of structural theories of human existence. In the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words. In the 1960s, the structurailst movement, based on France, attempted to synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault came to seen as the most important representative of the post structuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by rule-governed systems. Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the multiple interpretations of texts. Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche of a final and complete interpretation is impossible. Heidegger's idea about language "language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We do not originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we misperceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre existing system. So that every text and every sentence we speak or write is made up of the "already written"

"The Death of the Author"(1968) which is the 'hinge' round which Barthes turns from structuralism to post structuralism. In this essay, he announces the death of the author which is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of literary text and its immunity to the possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended or crafted into the work. This essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence. The work is not determined by intention or context. The text is free by its vary nature of all such restraints. Hence, as Barthes says in this essay, the death if the author is the birth of thee author. so the difference between the1966 essay and the 1973 book is a shift of attention from the text seen as something produced by the reader. Barthes also says in the absence of an author, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile.

Post structuralists accused structuralists of not following through the implications of the views about language on which their intellectual system is based. We saw a main characteristic view of post structuralism is the notion that language does not just reflect or record the world. We can say it shapes it so that how we see is what we see. The post structuralist maintains that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we have no certain standard by which to measure anything.