The Death of the Author

“The birth of the reader must be at the death of the Author”
– Roland Barthes

I'd like to highlight some important terms in this quotation that I think play a particularly important role in the realm of textuality.

Reader vs. Author

In Roland Barthes piece on the Death of the Author he makes it quite clear that a work can only truly live once all ties with the author have been cut off. In fact, he even goes as far as to state that "writing begins" only after a "disconnection occurs" between the author and the text (142). I believe that I can say that I disagree with Barthes in a few areas.


We (the class) spend so much time discussing the importance of originality and Benjamin's aura of a work, yet we often overlook the importance of the relationship between the author and the reader. Whereas Barthes believes that giving "a text an author is to impose a limit" on the writing, I believe that it opens up entirely new doors to discovering a text (148). I also don't understand why we're so focused on our reading of the text and how we're going to interpret the writings of someone else's work. It seems to me that we focus more and more on how the elements of textness change our interaction with a novel or a painting or a song or a building (you get the point) that we lose the importance of the author in all of this. So, in fact, I absolutely disagree with Barthes.


I think that the death of the author creates a gap in the work, a void that's missing a vital component. For the most part, an author's life plays a vital factor in the work they produce. As consumers of literature, I don't see how we can sit around and say that the author doesn't matter when there wouldn't be anything to read (look at/listen to) without an author, without a producer of the work.

What would a reader be without material to read? What would an author be without an audience? The two depend on each other. The work is merely the glue that ties the two together. Text is so much more than the words on the page. To cut off the producer or the receiver of the material would be to cut away an essential piece of a text.

Instead of erasing the author as Barthes suggests, we should instead strive to build the elements of textness by infusing the author with the reader as a stepping stone to understanding the greater TEXT.