The Death of the Author
Based on Wikipedia: The Death of the Author
Imagine you're reading a novel, and something catches your attention—a strange metaphor, an oddly specific detail, a character's inexplicable decision. Your instinct, probably, is to wonder what the author meant by it. Did they intend that symbolism? Were they drawing from personal experience? Is there a hidden message waiting to be decoded?
Roland Barthes would tell you that you're asking the wrong questions entirely.
In 1967, the French literary critic published a short, incendiary essay with a deliberately provocative title: "The Death of the Author." In just a few thousand words, Barthes declared that the author—as we traditionally understand them—should be removed from the equation of literary interpretation. The writer's intentions, biography, psychology, and personal beliefs? Irrelevant. The text stands alone, and its meaning belongs entirely to whoever reads it.
This idea seems either obviously true or obviously absurd, depending on how you approach it. That ambiguity is part of what makes it one of the most influential and controversial essays in literary theory.
The Problem with the Author
Barthes opens his essay with a puzzle drawn from a novella by Honoré de Balzac called "Sarrasine." In this story, a man falls in love with what he believes is a beautiful woman. She is, in fact, a castrato—a male singer who was castrated before puberty to preserve his high voice, a once-common practice in European opera.
Barthes quotes a passage where the protagonist rhapsodizes about his beloved's femininity, then asks: Who is really speaking here?
Is it Balzac the man, revealing his personal theories about women? Is it the fictional character, lost in delusion? Is it some universal voice of romantic convention? Is Balzac being ironic, or sincere? We cannot know, Barthes argues. And more importantly, we shouldn't try.
The traditional approach to literary criticism—the one Barthes was attacking—treated the author as the final authority on a text's meaning. Want to understand a poem? Study the poet's life. Confused by a novel's symbolism? Consult the author's letters, interviews, or diary entries. The text becomes a cryptogram, and the author holds the key.
Barthes found this approach both intellectually lazy and fundamentally wrong.
"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text."
Think about what this means in practice. If we decide that a novel "really means" whatever its author intended, we've closed off every other possible interpretation. We've turned reading from an act of discovery into an act of archaeology—digging for a single buried meaning rather than engaging with the living text in front of us.
The Birth of the Reader
If the author is dead, who takes their place? The reader.
Barthes reimagines the act of reading as fundamentally creative. When you encounter a text, you bring your own experiences, knowledge, cultural background, and associations. The meaning that emerges is produced by this collision between words on a page and everything you carry in your mind.
He makes this point with a striking metaphor, playing on the fact that the word "text" comes from the Latin "textus," meaning "woven." A text, Barthes writes, is "a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture." Every phrase carries echoes of other phrases, every image recalls other images. The author didn't create something from nothing—they assembled existing cultural materials into a new pattern.
And here's the key insight: those cultural materials mean different things to different people. A reference that resonates deeply with one reader might pass unnoticed by another. A metaphor that seems obvious in one era might become opaque in the next. The text doesn't have one fixed meaning waiting to be extracted. It generates new meanings with each reading.
This might sound like relativism run amok—if a text can mean anything, does it mean nothing? But Barthes isn't saying that interpretations are arbitrary or that anything goes. He's saying that meaning emerges from the encounter between text and reader, not from the author's intentions.
The Scriptor: A New Kind of Writer
Barthes doesn't eliminate the person who puts words on paper. He just reconceives them. Instead of an "Author"—a godlike figure whose intentions govern interpretation—he proposes the "scriptor."
The word choice is deliberate. "Author" shares a root with "authority." The Author-God creates meaning and bestows it upon readers, who can only receive and decipher. The scriptor, by contrast, merely writes. They produce the text, but they don't control what it means.
More radically, Barthes argues that the scriptor doesn't even precede the text. They come into existence alongside it, born in the act of writing itself. The scriptor has no biography relevant to interpretation, no inner life that explains the work. They are, in a sense, a function of the text rather than its origin.
"The text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent."
This is a deliberately extreme position, and Barthes knew it. He was trying to break a habitual pattern of thinking, to snap readers out of their reflexive author-worship. Whether anyone could (or should) actually read this way in practice is another question entirely.
The Company He Kept
Barthes wasn't working in isolation. His essay drew on currents that had been developing throughout the twentieth century.
He explicitly cites the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote that "it is language that speaks, not the author." Mallarmé, working in the late nineteenth century, pioneered experimental poetry that foregrounded language itself—its sounds, its visual arrangement on the page, its internal echoes—over any message the poet might want to convey.
Barthes also invokes Marcel Proust, whose massive novel "In Search of Lost Time" obsessively explores the gap between the person who writes and the "I" who narrates. Proust's narrator shares many biographical details with Proust himself, yet the novel continually reminds us that we're reading fiction, not autobiography. The relation between writer and writing is, as Barthes puts it, "inexorably blurred."
The Surrealists get a mention too. André Breton and his collaborators experimented with "automatic writing"—trying to transcribe thoughts directly, without conscious control, to access the unconscious mind. In their practice, the author becomes almost a medium, channeling something beyond their individual intentions.
And behind all of this looms the revolution in linguistics associated with Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure argued that language is a system of differences—words mean what they mean because of their relationships to other words, not because they inherently connect to things in the world. The speaking subject doesn't control meaning; they operate within a system that precedes and exceeds them.
A Theological Rebellion
Barthes frames his argument in surprisingly religious terms. The traditional Author, he suggests, functions like God—an origin point that guarantees meaning, an authority that settles all disputes about interpretation. The author's intention is the "theological meaning," the final truth behind the text's surface.
Killing the author is therefore, in Barthes's telling, a kind of atheism.
"Refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning to text liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."
This might seem overblown for a dispute about literary interpretation. But Barthes was writing in France in the late 1960s, amid enormous social and political upheaval. The essay appeared just months before the May 1968 protests that nearly toppled the French government. Questions about authority—who has it, how it's legitimated, whether it can be challenged—were in the air.
Reading Barthes' essay in this context, the death of the author becomes a metaphor for a broader liberation. If we can free ourselves from the tyranny of authorial intention, perhaps we can free ourselves from other tyrannies too.
The American Cousins
Barthes wasn't the first critic to question author-centered interpretation. In the United States, a movement called the New Criticism had been making related arguments since the 1940s.
The New Critics introduced the concept of the "intentional fallacy"—the idea that judging a text by what its author meant to achieve is a mistake. A poem, they argued, should be read as a self-contained object. Its meaning is in the words on the page, not in the poet's head. In a famous formulation, once a poem is written, "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it."
This sounds remarkably similar to Barthes. But there's a crucial difference.
The New Critics wanted to find the correct interpretation of a text—they just thought that interpretation should come from careful analysis of the words themselves, not from biographical research. They believed in determinate meaning; they just located it in the text rather than the author.
Barthes went further. For him, the death of the author doesn't simply transfer authority from writer to text. It disperses authority entirely. The text doesn't have a correct interpretation waiting to be discovered. It's a site of multiple, potentially contradictory meanings that readers produce and reproduce endlessly.
Foucault's Friendly Challenge
Two years after Barthes' essay appeared, the philosopher Michel Foucault published his own essay on related themes: "What Is an Author?"
Foucault approached the question from a different angle. He wasn't interested in killing the author so much as analyzing what the category of "author" does in our culture. Why do we care who wrote something? What work does the author's name perform?
He introduced the concept of the "author function"—the various roles that attribution to an author plays in how we receive and classify texts. The author's name, Foucault argued, isn't just a label. It's a principle of grouping, a way of establishing relationships between texts, a marker that affects how we read.
Some texts require authors—we read a novel differently when we know it's by a celebrated writer versus an anonymous hack. Other texts don't—nobody cares who wrote a shopping list or a technical manual. The author function varies across time periods and genres.
Foucault didn't directly cite Barthes in his essay, but scholars have read it as a subtle response. Where Barthes proclaimed the author's death in sweeping, almost apocalyptic terms, Foucault offered a cooler, more sociological analysis. The author isn't exactly dead; they're a function of discourse, a construction that serves particular purposes in particular contexts.
The Author Strikes Back
Not everyone accepted Barthes' pronouncement. The author, it turns out, has proved remarkably difficult to kill.
The literary theorist Seán Burke wrote an entire book in response, pointedly titled "The Death and Return of the Author." Burke argued that Barthes' position was ultimately self-undermining. After all, we read "The Death of the Author" as a text by Barthes—his name on the essay matters to us, shapes how we receive his arguments. The very act of proclaiming the author's death seems to require an author.
Some critics took a more playful approach. In a satirical essay published in the Cambridge Quarterly, a scholar writing under the pseudonym J.C. Carlier (actually Professor Cedric Watts of the University of Sussex) argued that "The Death of the Author" is itself a kind of test. Those who take it literally fail; those who recognize it as ironic, as a work of deliberate provocation and "fine satiric fiction," pass.
Jacques Derrida, the philosopher most associated with deconstruction, paid tribute to Barthes with characteristic wordplay. His essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes"—note the plural—reflected on what it means for a theorist of the author's death to actually die (Barthes passed away in 1980, hit by a laundry van while crossing a street in Paris).
What Lives On
Fifty years later, the death of the author refuses to stay dead as a topic. The essay's ideas have migrated far beyond literary theory into education, information science, and cultural studies.
In pedagogy, Barthes' emphasis on the reader's role has influenced approaches to teaching that center student interpretation over authoritative answers. If meaning emerges from the reader's engagement with a text, then education becomes less about transmitting correct interpretations and more about equipping students to produce their own readings.
Information literacy instruction has drawn on these ideas too. Librarians influenced by Barthes have experimented with approaches that move away from simply pointing students toward authoritative sources and toward helping them engage dialogically with texts, bringing their own questions and frameworks.
Meanwhile, digital culture has created new contexts for thinking about authorship. Wikipedia articles, collaboratively written by anonymous contributors, have no author in the traditional sense. Fan fiction communities routinely reinterpret and extend published works, generating new meanings that original authors might never have intended or endorsed. Open source software projects blur the line between writer and reader as users modify and redistribute code.
In some ways, the internet has made Barthes' vision feel less radical and more like a simple description of how texts actually function now.
The Stubborn Appeal of the Author
And yet. Despite decades of theory arguing otherwise, we persist in caring about authors. We want to know if a memoir is true, if a novelist drew from personal experience, if a songwriter was going through a breakup. We read biography alongside fiction, trying to illuminate one with the other.
When an author says something offensive in an interview, we debate whether to boycott their books. When an author dies, we mourn not just a person but a voice we'll never hear from again. When an author speaks about their own work, we listen—even if we know, intellectually, that their interpretation isn't privileged.
Maybe this is because the author was never really alive in the first place—not as the godlike figure Barthes was attacking, anyway. Perhaps his essay was battling a strawman, or at least a particular mode of criticism that was already fading by 1967.
Or maybe the author persists because we need them. Stories about isolated texts generating meaning through pure encounter with readers might satisfy theorists, but most actual readers want something more. They want a person behind the words, someone who chose these particular phrases for particular reasons, someone they can imagine knowing.
Barthes himself, ironically, has become one of those figures. People read his essays seeking his distinctive sensibility—playful, digressive, attentive to pleasure. They study his biography for insight into his work. They treat him, in short, as an author. The death of the author, it seems, cannot kill the desire for authors.
A Productive Paradox
Perhaps the best way to read "The Death of the Author" is as a tool rather than a doctrine. Barthes isn't telling us how reading actually works; he's offering a deliberate provocation, a way of shaking loose our assumptions.
When you catch yourself wondering what an author "really meant," you might pause and ask: What meanings can this text generate for me, right now, as the reader I am? When you're tempted to treat the author's statement about their work as the final word, you might remember that they're just one reader among many—an unusually positioned reader, perhaps, but a reader nonetheless.
The author is dead. Long live the reader. Long live the text. And long live the endlessly renewed encounter between the two, generating meanings that no one, not even the person who first put words to paper, could fully anticipate or control.