The Death of the Author

Introduction

The essay first appeared in 1967 in English translation in the American multimedia magazine Aspen, and in French only in 1968. Barthes begins with a sentence from Balzac’s story “Sarrasine” and asks who is speaking in it – the character, Balzac, or literature itself – and concludes that writing is the destruction of every origin. He names Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust and the Surrealists as forerunners. A text is a tissue of quotations drawn from countless centres of culture, and its unity lies not in its origin but in its destination, the reader. Foucault’s lecture “What Is an Author?” (1969) took up the question in a historical perspective.

Connections

Builds on

• Mythologies1957 · Roland Barthes

More works by Roland Barthes

• 1957Mythologies