This has been written about before, of course. I've been expecting someone to post pdfs of these two famous essays, but since no one else has done it, here you go.
"The Death of the Author," by Roland Barthes
The translated essay as it originally appeared in Aspen Magazine:
"The Death of the Author"
Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"
Here's a comparatively recent (2010) mainstream piece on Barthes' essay that was published in the
Guardian:
In Theory: The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes:
"As soon as a fact is narrated without a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively -- that is to say, outside of any function other than that of the practice of the symbol itself -- a disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death and writing begins. . . . The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."
"Though the sway of the author remains powerful . . . certain writers have long attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, and for us as well, it is language which speaks, not the author. To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language, and not 'me', acts and performs. Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing. . . ."
"A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation. However, there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader -- not, as previously said, the author."
Michel Foucault (from "What Is an Author?"):
"It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the author-function arises out of their scission -- in the division and distance of the two."
Maurice Blanchot (from
The Essential Solitude, which predates the essays by Barthes and Foucault):
Quote:
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In the solitude of the work - the work of art, the literary work - we discover a more essential solitude. It excludes the complacent isolation of individualism; it has nothing to do with the quest for singularity. The fact that one sustains a stalwart attitude throughout the disciplined course of the day does not dissipate it. He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn't know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere. The writer never knows whether the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another.
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