Life & Background
Barthes was born in Cherbourg in 1915; his father was killed in a naval battle the following year, and he was raised in modest circumstances by his mother, to whom he remained devoted and whose death in 1977 produced Camera Lucida and a private mourning diary. Tuberculosis interrupted his studies and kept him in sanatoria for years in the 1930s and 40s, where he read widely and outside the French academic curriculum. He taught in Romania and Egypt, then worked at the CNRS and the École pratique des hautes études, coming to a chair at the Collège de France only in 1976. He wrote for a general readership as well as an academic one — the Mythologies pieces began as magazine columns. He was struck by a laundry van in a Paris street in 1980 and died a month later.
The Death of the Author
The essay argues that a text's meaning is not fixed by its author's intention, biography, or psychology. Barthes objects that criticism has habitually explained a work by reference to the man or woman who produced it, as though the author were the father of the text and its final guarantee of meaning. He proposes instead that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin, and that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash — a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. The consequence is that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
The essay is short, polemical, and deliberately overstated, and much of the criticism aimed at it treats it as a literal claim about biography rather than a claim about interpretive authority. Foucault's What Is an Author? complicates it usefully by asking not whether the author exists but what function the author's name performs in classifying and legitimating discourse. Barthes's own later distinction, in S/Z, between readerly texts, which position the reader as a consumer of settled meaning, and writerly texts, which require the reader to produce meaning, gives the argument a working method. His last books turn away from system altogether, and A Lover's Discourse and Camera Lucida are personal, fragmentary, and openly subjective.
Key Concepts
Why Barthes Matters
Barthes is the bridge between structuralism and post-structuralism, and no single essay has done more to shift twentieth-century criticism away from authorial intention — the New Critics had attacked intentionalism, but Barthes replaced the author with the reader rather than with the self-contained text. Mythologies established the method of reading everyday culture semiotically, founding much of what became cultural studies. His terminology — readerly and writerly, the work versus the text, the punctum, jouissance — is standard vocabulary in literary theory papers.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Writing Degree Zero1953
- Mythologies1957
- Elements of Semiology1964
- The Death of the Author1967
- S/Z1970
- The Pleasure of the Text1973
- A Lover's Discourse1977
- Camera Lucida1980