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Poem And Colonialism In Roland Barthes's The Death Of The Author

Decent Essays

The Unified Structure of Theory and Literature In his famous essay, “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes examines the relationship between an author and their work. His central idea maintains that the reader is the determiner of meaning in a text through the reading of it as an active process, rather than the reader finding a hidden meaning that the author placed in the text to be deciphered. Barthes describes the writer as a "scriptor" or someone who writes simply to engage in the act of writing, but not in the creation of meaning (52). For Barthes, the reader determines the meaning of the text, and the author or writer is simply a vessel who writes the words in the text. The language in the text is “performative;” it performs for the reader who creates meaning out of it that is …show more content…

For example, a student may read Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) without any knowledge of Colonialism and Nativism in American history and may interpret the text as an endorsement of slavery and racism. Conversely, the professor may take the aforementioned historical context of American Culture and apply those ideas to their interpretation (a consensus among Melville Scholars) that Melville was using the ambiguous nature of the story to show that racism and slavery are problems inherent in the American experience that must be acknowledged. With Barthes ideas applied here, the student is no less valid in interpreting Melville than the Professor, but the Professor would still find the student guilty of misinterpreting Benito Cereno due to the lack of historical context in their argument which is not within the academic consensus. That is not to say that Barthes meant that anyone's interpretation is valid merely because they read a text and created meaning from it, but he failed to account for the problems that arise in a classroom setting when a work is free of the Author's

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