Talk:The Death of the Author

This article would benefit from some description of whatever criticism of this work exists. Turly-burly 05:09, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Having read in Molly Nesbit's "Who Was the Author?" that Barthes' essay was first published in a BOX, not a conventional journal, I did some googling and found a wonderful documentation of that journal [1] on UBU web, which is a research-based site and trustworthy and thorough. Based on this, I added a bit at the beginning about this, added a link to the documentation at UBUweb and change the year of publication to 1967. I'm amazed that this is so little known, I never heard about it in years of studying literary theory. Lijil 14:20, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So was this essay first published in English, or was it published before 1967 in French? --Jahsonic 21:09, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't figured that out yet. Lijil 07:51, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Barthes and Foucault

I would say that the idea that Barthes' article is based on Derrida and Foucault is pretty far off the mark. Derrida had hardly published any of his work at Barthes' time of writing, and Foucault's comment ('What is an Author') do certainly not support Barthes' views. Instead Foucault characterizes Barthes views as old-fashioned. And Foucault certainly don't claim that literature is not a product of individual authors. In fact, that's the outdated idea he accuses Barthes of advocating. Foucault's 'discourses' is not the idea of fixed and non-personal 'structures' that generates something out of nothing; they're an attempt of explaining the dynamics of collective understandings and the way such understanding influence the individual.

I'm painfully aware of my fellow literary critics' lack of understanding of Foucault; still I'm as shocked as ever every time I see this particular essay read 'up-side down'...

T.B.Hansen, Oslo, Norway