#for the prompt jfhvjfhrjvh

[smute]

Hiii do you have any other literary trope/ device like verisimilitude that you'd like to nerd out about? I'm sitting in front of you, chin on hand, legs swinging ☺️

hell yeah!!! death of the author!

not a literary device but it's a term i come across almost every single day on this here webbed site (mainly in posts about hp and jk rowling) but NOT ONCE have i seen it used correctly so.. maybe i can clear some things up

(warning: this is gonna be extremely condensed and simplified so don't quote me pls lmao)

ok so the death of the author refers to an essay by roland barthes (la mort de l'auteur) which remains very influential in literary theory to this day. it's a pretty provocative title and barthes probably regretted his choice when he had to explain to someone for the hundredth time that "thats not what i fucking meant" hgjfhgf but ANYWAY. contrary to what the title may suggest, it is NOT about the disappearance of the author but about giving power to the consumer of a work of art (the reader).

basically, it's a critique of the dominant author-centered theories in literary criticism at the time (1960s) and the essay's central argument is that an author doesn't have sovereign authority over their text since, in the process of writing, they are not creating a wholly original work but rather a collage of impressions, experiences, other texts, etc. this idea of a disjointed text as an assembly of parts means that a text doesn't have a single "true" meaning and so it cannot be "understood". instead, meanings (plural) are co-created and re-created over and over again by the reader.

to reflect that separation of "authorship" from "authority" barthes introduces the term "scriptor". instead of a traditional author, who creates an original work through the power of their imagination alone, a scriptor combines existing words and texts in new ways, but they are unable to decide the meaning of their work. i think it's important to emphasize that he wasn't trying to diminish the creative effort of writers. he just explains that every modern writer draws on established conventions and traditions and other existing texts. for barthes, the figure of the scriptor is born with the text, "here and now", in the present moment, through the process of reading.

so... in a sense, it is about "separating the art from the artist" but not in a "jkr is transphobic but harry potter isnt" kind of way, which is what a lot of people seem to think. barthes was just trying to open up new ways of interpreting a text and he opposed the limiting veneration of a god-like author. thats why he connected the death of the author to the birth of the reader. the main idea is simply that authorial intent is only one of many equally valid interpretations. it CAN be an interesting pursuit to figure out what a writer meant, but barthes argues that it's impossible to find a definitive answer to that question, and that OTHER perspectives are just as important. texts can hold meaning beyond what the author intended, and they can even develop meanings that contradict the author's intentions. the scriptor assembles a text, but the unity of a text is created by the reader.

"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."

barthes invokes some important structuralist principles (every text is part of a larger context, etc) but in his critique of authority and his rejection of the search for a single objective truth he bridges the gap to poststructuralism. and thats why his essay was so important. the death of the author is not an excuse to put on blinkers and to consume the works of bigots uncritically. it actually encourages readers to be critical and to consider the broader context of a text.

to circle back to the example of harry potter: the death of the author does not mean "claiming" hp as your own and trying to detach jk rowling's fictional work from from her very real bigotry. (it's impossible anyway because one informs the other.) the death of the author is actually the death of the author's authority over their text. it is not an excuse to shield art from criticism against its creator. quite the opposite! in jkr's case, her hateful comments actually open up new perspectives for the re-examination of the harry potter books.

tl;dr: (1) it is impossible for an author to decide the meaning of their own work, (2) it is impossible for a reader to determine the author's intent through the process of reading, and (3) a cultural text does not have a singular objectively true meaning.