The Author Is Dead!

This desolate cry echoed through the literary world in the latter part of the twentieth century and spurred a heated discussion on the role of the author in literary criticism and understanding. It started a crisis in modern literary scholarship, a crisis of authorship and ownership and meaning, a crisis that we are still trying to resolve.

The two essays that began this debate were “The Death of the Author” (“La Mort de l’Auteur”) by Roland Barthes, first published in 1968, and “What Is an Author” (“Qu’est-ce Qu’un Auteur”) by Michel Foucault, published in 1969.