The Death of the Author

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Overview

What do you understand by the term ‘author’?
What do you understand by the term ‘work’?

The Author Function
What idea do you have of what an ‘author’ is or does?
Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’
Barthes and language

Our ideas of ‘author’ and ‘reader’ are historically and culturally determined, and are subject to change.
Language is a system of signs used to produce a facsimile, or simulacrum, of the real world either in speech or writing.
Language, and the meanings associated with words, are all recycled by writers. There is, therefore, no ‘author’, or single ‘authority’ in a text.
Instead, there is Foucault’s ‘author function’, an idea or process which is socially constructed and which transforms (by ‘superstition’ for Barthes or ‘magic’ for Foucault’) a person into an Author: it is a role or an idea, not a person.