Death of the Author

The death of the author is a represented in literary theory in particular poststructuralist embossing concept that pulls the classical idea of complete control of the writer about his own creation in doubt. For the text interpret this approach means in particular that the presumed intention of the author is irrelevant texts and also quite able to develop meanings that contradict the intention of the author.

Overview

The basic text of this theory is Roland Barthes ' ​​essay The Death of the Author (1968 ), another Michel Foucault's What is an Author? (1969). Related items found there are already in the poetics of modernity, in the Anglo-American New Criticism and the semiotic theory Umberto Eco ( Opera aperta, 1962; German The Open Work, 1973). The implications of the neukritischen and the (post) structuralist literary consideration (which was also known as nouvelle critique in France) are indeed different, yet they have the same thrust. In both cases it was directed against the prevailing since the 19th century approach to the study of literature to interpret texts mainly in connection with the biography of the author, and against psychologizing interpretations, such as those IA Richards promoted in England. The author was this conventional opinion (especially in the wake of Hobbes and of the romantic genius - idea ) is not only the author of a text, but also the authority that determined his meaning, and these original meaning had to be reconstructed, if necessary also author - biographical clues.

The author -oriented interpretation puts this concept in opposition to a purely text-based interpretation and thus increases the reader and his interpretive skills for sense-making authority in the process of signification. In Barthes have the phrase, the " death of the author " only enable the " birth of the reader ".

Barthes, Foucault and the deconstruction

Roland Barthes applies as author of the slogan, which he coined in an essay about Honoré de Balzac Sarrasine 1968. In the further discussion, especially with the lyrics Proust, Valéry and Mallarmé, he has the traditional conception of the author back as meaningful instance. In its place is " Skriptor " occurred, an author-function, which itself comes in the reading and thus the text into existence - but not as the transcendent guarantor of meaning, but as composed of heterogeneous quotations, allusions and discursive cultural practices rhetorical function that resembles a classic narrator instance.

Foucault's approach is less radical. The essay What is an Author? first turns against a common metonymic process the history of science to replace theoretical positions by the names of their representatives ( " Darwin " instead of The Origin of Species ), making the writing of history is in danger of degenerating into a "biography of great men ." Another danger he sees through the dialectic of man and the work given: The author instance arises from the fact that a number of writings bears the same name; conversely almost every text is to " work" when he was only wearing a sounding author names. Yet Foucault closes the meaningful use of an author's instance not: It is used to mark " great discursive units " and is even such a discourse, which is subject to various historical and cultural changes, but is also very closely linked with the property: "A private letter may have a writer, but he has no author; a contract may well have a guarantor, but no author. [ ... ] The author function is therefore characteristic of existence, distribution and functioning of certain discourses within a society. "