User:Kim/reading/The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes, 1967

1 (Intro)

starting text with Sarrasine Balzac sentence, that he wonders about: who is speaking/ writing/ thinking this?

it's impossible to know bc all writing comes from this special voice, composed of multiple

2 (the author: a modern figure)

produced by society at end of middle ages, english empire and french nationalism, reformation

result of capitalist ideology

3 (perspectives)

About Mallarme:

to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality that point where language alone acts, “performs,”

About Proust:

blurring relation of the writer and his characters making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write.

also mentioned:

Surrealism

discipline of Literature

4 (modern writer)

time is not longer the same: the author pre exists the book, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with their text

the modern writer...

... he must accentuate this gap and endlessly “elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression),

5 (citation)

the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture

writer can only imitate gesture, their only power is to combine

internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum

6 (reading)

the true site of writing is reading

a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other

the pace where thsi multiplicity gathered and connected is the reader

reader is the place where citations, which a writing consists of, are inscribed