The Death of the Author: A Difficult Demise - Rethinking Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”

Abstract

Roland Barthes’ proposition of “the death of the author” represents a pivotal revolution in 20th‑century literary criticism, overturning the traditional author‑centered conception of literature and advocating the “killing” of the author to liberate both the reader and the text. This thesis re‑examines this theory by tracing the structuralist features of The Death of the Author. It demonstrates that Barthes, drawing on structural linguistics, distinguishes between “author” and “scriptor,” as well as between “work” and “text,” emphasizing the primacy of language and the multidimensional space of the text. The article further analyzes how the theory dismantles authorial authority from multiple angles, and then explores the resultant liberation of the reader and the carnival of the text. However, alongside its theoretical contributions, the thesis also identifies certain problems: it neglects the author’s individual style and underestimates the author’s value to the text. Moreover, in reading practice, the reader remains influenced by the author, and in turn transforms into a new author. The thesis argues that what Barthes terms “the death of the author” is in fact the death of authorial authority, not the disappearance of the author as a creative individual. The author may “return” in a new guise, bringing his or her lived experience back into literary activity.