Response to Barthes – Death of the Author

In summary here Barthes is saying the author of the written word and visual arts have often spoon-fed their audience with the information they needed to understand a work. Giving a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) phenomenon. He suggests that leads to a sterile interaction between the audience and the work and that there is, in fact, another way to do this by the focus on the work its self and not the just the intention of the artist.

Barthes other way is to have the viewer question (the images) instead of passively looking at them; Barthes is saying this leads to a richer overall experience. Barthes believed that by restricting the information given to the audience about what they were seeing encouraged them to fill in the gaps with their own experiences, with the result that no two people will interpret an image in the same way.

He suggests that the Author is dead because using this new way of thing, the author’s input is marginalised, and the work itself becomes the focus. Which, as it happens, mirrors exactly what happens when an author does indeed die in real life.

References

Barthes, R. (n.d.). Death of the Author. [online] https://writing.upenn.edu. Available at: https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf [Accessed 10 Feb. 2018].