Knowra Death of the Author Death of the Author A literary theory that treats a work’s meaning as independent of its author’s intentions and biography, locating interpretation in the text and its readers.
Authorial Intent : The purpose or meaning an author consciously intends to convey through a work. Death of the Author rejects this as the final authority on a work’s meaning.
Roland Barthes : A French literary theorist and semiotician whose work shaped structuralism and poststructuralism. His 1967 essay gave the theory its influential name and formulation.
New Criticism : A literary movement that analyzes a work as a self-contained verbal structure, emphasizing close reading. Its focus on the text overlaps with Barthes’s argument, though its critical aims differ.
Close reading : A detailed analysis of a text’s language, form, imagery, and structure. It offers a practical way to ground interpretation in the work rather than the author’s life.
Author function : Michel Foucault’s concept of the author as a role that classifies, groups, and regulates discourse. It reframes authorship as a social function rather than simply a source of meaning.
Hermeneutics : The theory and practice of interpreting texts, symbols, and other forms of expression. This theory intervenes in the broader question of how texts acquire meaning.
Structuralism : An intellectual approach that studies systems of relations underlying language, culture, and meaning. Barthes’s earlier structuralist work helped shift attention from individual authors to signifying systems.
Intentionalism : The view that an author’s intentions help determine or constrain the meaning of a work. It directly opposes the theory’s refusal to make authorial intention decisive.
Intertextuality : The ways a text’s meaning is shaped by its relations to other texts. Barthes treats writing as woven from existing cultural language rather than created from private intention.
Originality : The quality of being novel or independently created rather than copied or derived. Barthes’s account of writing as recombination unsettles the image of the author as an originator.
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