Roland barthes theory

Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism 's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.

The essay's first English -language publication was in the American journal Aspen , no. The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text , a book that also included his "From Work to Text".

Roland barthes - wikipedia

In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of an author's identity to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism against which he argues, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, however, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text.

Readers must thus, according to Barthes, separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny a notion similar to Erich Auerbach 's discussion of narrative tyranny in biblical parables. In a well-known passage, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations", drawn from "innumerable centers of culture", rather than from one, individual experience.

The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins", or its creator, "but in its destination", or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a "scriptor" a word Barthes uses expressively to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms "author" and "authority".

The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended?

His answer is that we cannot. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what.