Death of the Author (Wordhole)

Definition

Death of the Author

Text by Roland Barthes, published in 1967. Barthes claims here that the meaning of a text is given not by the author but by the reader. It belongs to a school of literary theory criticism called reader-response criticism with applications not only in literature but in fields such as psychology and philosophy.

Citations

The text has been extensively citated and not always in a good way, as eg. in Jacques Derrida's ironic essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes".

In context

One of the most well-known applications of this text is critical pedagogy, advocating dialogic learning (letting students arrive to their own conclusions, rather than being fed the meaning of a text).