Barthes, R. (1968) 'The Death of the Author', Fontana, London
Was given to me as a task to read and understand
Below is my personal understanding of this chapter of his book
Barthes talks about the ‘author’ as someone who represents the modern age/figure how the idea that a current author may come across as the fountain of today’s knowledge. He explains how an author's work and literature describes the author himself, how the literature paints the image of the authors self and being..
It is the language and literature itself that the author creates that speaks and has power, not the actual person creating the work.
Barthes then goes on to talk about how the modern example of text is read in such a way that the author in the work is completely absent. There is no thought of the person who creates but instead the thought is only places on the figure and image that the work or words is creating.
The author or creator of literature is seen as the before product of the work or text which is the after product and it can be represented by putting this idea against the idea of that a father tends to his child, the child being the product of the father..
The last few pages of the chapter then goes on to say that a writer can not create something truly original but instead mixes together knowledge and text that has already been created, by taking bit’s of what has been and still is and molding it into the author's own image.
The birth of a reader is that which costs the death of an author.
So I read this chapter written by barthes to understand that the the reader of a literature shows their appreciation to the story behind the text and only that.. the mind of the reader will not think highly of the writer as they do for the literature, because it is the literature that is the product of interest, which creates this space of emptiness between the author and the literature, this space is responsible for the absence of the authors ‘being’ and existence in any text.
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