Roland Barthes Death Of The Author Quotes

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

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.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. 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…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…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. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]

Beckett seemed to be working through what Roland Barthes in his seminal essay “The Death of the Author” described as “tissues of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

Because Roland Barthes said it all, didn't he, when he coined the phrase "death of the author"? When you die--physically or metaphorically--the story is out of your hands. No matter how you write something--to what insane, detailed, meticulous degree--you cannot control the mind of your reader, nor your reader's interpretation. One masterpiece to you might read like drivel to the next. And so we must come to terms with the fact that the story will never be complete nor perfect. no matter how much we work our fingers to the bone or allow our backs to bend under the incredible weight of possibility, potentiality. Art is art is art. What will be will be will be will be.

The death of the author is the birth of the reader,” Roland Barthes declared in 1967, liberating the text from the interpretative tyranny of the author. Shakespeare’s works are the quintessentially liberated texts, limitless in their possible meanings, and Shakespeare is the deadest author—always already absent, as the theorists like to say. His death has meant, above all, the birth of the scholar.