week 4 reading response

What is an Author and Death of the Author

This is the second or third time I've read these two essays (for school, definitely not independently, ha). I'm going to respond to these two pieces in conjunction with one another rather than separately because What is an Author is somewhat of a follow-up to Barthes' original Death of the Author. I find Barthes a lot more readable than Foucault, at least in this instance. I think this might be because Barthes examines an actual phenomenon and succinctly crafts a conclusive stance on the subject--that the meaning of a text is independent of the author's intent and lived experience. On the other hand, Foucault's essay leaves many more hypotheticals (the entire last page is a series of rhetorical questions). Although having a more direct conclusion makes Barthes' writing more understandable to me, Foucault's ambiguity is probably more in the right from a theoretical standpoint (in my opinion). When engaging with media, you cannot completely divorce the creator from their creation; you must consider all individual forces being used to extrapolate meaning from a text, including author, reader, history, and present culture. He rightfully points out that his analysis is only in the realm of writing, but I'd say the same arguments could be made for any form of art.

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