Essay on An Analysis of Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author

Literature; it has compelled us, entertained us, educated us, and drove us to madness. It has served as life instruction, by using the characters as the lesson plan. It is sometimes blunt, sometimes ugly, and in Truman Capote’s case, is so gruesome that we do not dare forget it.

“School made us ‘literate’ but did not teach us to read for pleasure.” -Ambeth R. Ocampo

Today, no one seems to give much value of literary works or reading. Not because it doesn’t give anything beneficiary, but because not everyone had the urged to at least finish a book. We now live in a world where social medias almost dominates our daily activities. It’s unlikely to have a place for us to consume a non-fiction or fiction book. As absurd as it sounds but that’s how people often think. We now live in an egalitarian society, where everyone is given the freedom and right of its own.

To read like a writer means knowing in advanced type of writing will be assigned. This is beneficial, Bunn argues, because when reading like a writer, knowing the style assigned, allows one to look for specific techniques in writing that they could adopt in their own work. To understand how piece was written, or to look back on his architect analogy, it is important to ask questions, assessing what “construction” techniques were effective in building a text. Before reading, one should ask himself who the audience is and the author's purpose in writing. While reading the texts itself, Bunn recommends looking at the style of language used and the effectiveness of evidence as well as the parts that don’t work or are confusing. While reading like a writer and asking these questions, Bunn encourages students to look for whether aspects are appropriate and effective as well as the positive or negative effect they have on readers. Bunn, in recognizing that every word choice made in a text has a certain effect, encourages readers to look critically at that effect in order to decide what strategies work should be adopted in their own

“... becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader and that is the real payoff” (10).

In this article, Bartholomae talks about writers and how they need “invent the university” by imitating the particular language their readers use. He makes strong points on how and why writers need to do this. You must do it by connecting your own point of few to the view of your audience, who is reading your work.

Any word spoken or written in any shape or form carries a strong influential power. However, when they are written, they have the opportunity to be revised again and again until perfection is met in the eyes of the writer. A writer desires to communicate with its readers and impart an influential piece of knowledge. The monster within the book Frankenstein could have been persuaded into another course of life had his literature been a different selection. Sorrows of Werter focusses on the importance of emotion and romance in one’s life.

“I, the unworthy writer, an unsophisticated, unenlightened, and by nature unintelligent, but I am fortunate both to have received not a little favor from my scholarly father, and to have a cultured

Knowing about the writer of a literary text can shape significantly the way that it is read. Consider the effect of the writer’s context on your understanding of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.

“It is through literature that we learn about life. Through literature we profit from the experiences of others, comparing them with our own.” - Bob Cameron

In order to achieve a deeper understanding of what this quote really means, an analysis of the context of the quote must be established. This quote coincides with Barthes’ philosophy during his transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. In 1968, Barthes wrote an impactful essay, Death of the Author. In this essay, he explored a radically different viewpoint of authorship than what was popular at the time. According to his viewpoint, a work of literature was not finished when published by its’ author, he wouldn’t even consider it a complete work. According to him, “to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 5). Barthes did

As the era of literature slowly declines, the expert critiques and praise for literature are lost. Previously, novels were bursting at the seams with metaphors, symbolism, and themes. In current times, “novels” are simply short stories that have been elaborated on with basic plot elements that attempt to make the story more interesting. Instead of having expert critical analysis written about them, they will, most likely, never see that, as recent novels have nothing to analyze. Even books are beginning to collect dust, hidden away and forgotten, attributing to the rise of companies such as Spark Notes. An author deserves to have his work praised, no matter how meager and the masses should have the right to embrace it or to reject it. As

Reader-response theory identifies the reader as an affective agent who imparts real exist-ence and life to the work, completing its meaning through interpretation. Reader- response criti-cism argues that literature should be viewed as art in which each reader creates his or her own-most likely unique, text-related performance. I am using Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish’s takes on Reader Response for my study.

Before the 20th Century, literature was pretty straightforward; the narrators were reliable, the timelines were linear, and the perspective was clear, but then somebody got the idea to mix it up. This is how we got books such as The Great Gatsby and one of our class texts, Orlando. For some, this was a startling and uncomfortable transition from what used to be considered the, “normal” format which was very up front in terms of structure and voice. Others found it to be more exciting and, while it was still weird and unsettling for those people, it forced people to think more about what the books were trying to communicate, instead of just being handed the message; they had to work for it. This has become one of the leading reasons that societies are encouraged to read; if you read a book that forces you to think, your mind becomes stronger and this promotes an increase in intelligence and creativity.

Fish’s Reader Response Criticism is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged to be correct or incorrect, but merely belonging to one “interpretive community” or another. The first idea may be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it circumscribes the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers by itself strong arguments countervailing the formalist stance of the New Critics. But as we will see,