The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a prominent literary critic, essayist, and language philosopher in the latter half of the 20th century. His work traversed many areas of study: literature, philosophy, writing, advertising, photography, popular culture, memoir, and more. He wrote for both academic audiences and popular ones. Barthes was influenced by and contributed to the theory of structuralism—broadly speaking, an approach to studying language and culture that seeks to identify consistent and predictable underlying structures and patterns that are independent of specific cultures. As part of this, he made major contributions in semiotics. Semiotics, or the science of signs and symbols, examines how sign systems function and investigates work they do in society.

One of Barthes’s best-known works besides this essay is Mythologies (1952), a collection of essays that uses semiotic method to examine aspects of contemporary French popular culture, such as toys, plastic, wine, detergents, professional wrestling, and margarine. Barthes argues that these function as modern myths—not simply false ideas but discrete incidents of the belief systems of modern French life. “The Death of the Author” is similarly a “mythology”—an examination of the author as a contemporary “myth” in whom readers and critics “believe” because it accords with and seems to support the dominant belief systems of the day, such as the

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