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Jill Walker Rettberg

Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author. Aspen no. 5+6, 1967. - 0 views

www.ubu.com/...threeEssays.html

author literary theory authorship

shared by Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology?
  • all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
  • in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose "performance" may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his "genius"
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person,"
  • once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09
       
      See the discovery of would-be-pseudonymous video "authors": Lonelygirl16, karen26, ParkRidge47
  • Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless.
  • To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing
    • Jill Walker Rettberg
      Jill Walker Rettberg on 22 Sep 09
       
      Very close to Foucault's analysis in What is an Author? (1970)
  • utterly transforms the modern text
  • he reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic,
  • by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:'
  • no one (that is, no "person") utters it:
  • he true locus of writing is reading.
  • the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.
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