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"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. The title is a pun on ''Le Morte d'Arthur'', a 15th-century compilation of smaller Arthurian legend stories, written by several anonymous authors with heavy reinterpretation by the editor, Sir Thomas Malory. As a result, the final text of ''Le Morte d'Arthur'' is ultimately the work of several authors across several centuries, and thus the style of analysis Barthes criticizes in his essay is difficult, if not impossible, to apply. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal ''Aspen'', no. 5-6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine ''Manteia'', no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, ''Image-Music-Text'' (1977), a book that also included his "From Work To Text". ==Content== In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity—their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text". Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables).〔Erich Auerbach, ''Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature'', trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1953, repr. 1974 "(Chapter 1 )"〕 Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue (fabric ) of quotations", drawn from "innumerable centers of culture", rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins", or its creator, "but in its destination", or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority"). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, () is not the subject with the book as predicate". Every work is "eternally written here and now", with each re-reading, because the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story ''Sarrasine'' in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. (Barthes returned to ''Sarrasine'' in his book ''S/Z'', where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.) Acknowledging the presence of this idea (or variations of it) in the works of previous writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that "it is language which speaks". He also recognized Marcel Proust as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring…the relation between the writer and his characters"; the Surrealist movement for employing the practice of "automatic writing" to express "what the head itself is unaware of"; and the field of linguistics as a discipline for "showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process". Barthes' articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a "single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God)", readers of a text discover that writing, in reality, constitutes "a multi-dimensional space", which cannot be "deciphered", only "disentangled". "Refusing to assign a 'secret,' ultimate meaning" to text "liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."〔Roland Barthes' "(The Death of the Author )"〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Death of the Author」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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