Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Clara Claiborne Park

When the Author died in France in 1968, it was Roland Barthes who with his essay "La mort de l'auteur" administered the coup de grâce. Jacques Derrida had already warned, in Of Grammatology, of the frivolity of thinking that "'Descartes,' 'Leibniz,' 'Rousseau,' 'Hegel,' are names of authors," since they indicated "neither identities nor causes," but rather "the name of a problem." Michel Foucault would later record an "author-function" arising out of the "scission" between "the author" and "the actual writer." The subtext for all three shimmered in the Parisian spring, in the great year of academic revolution, when the students took to the streets and even the sacred baccalauréat felt the tremor. Barthes's way of putting it was somewhat more inspiriting than the transmogrification of authors into functions or problems: "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of...
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