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About Roland Barthes

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980), which spawned the homonymous literary theory. Barthes 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. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".

Roland Barthes writes about Semiotics, History and criticism, Literature, Roland Barthes, French literature, and France. Their best-known work is Mythologies.

On FindMyTBR we track 7 books by Roland Barthes, 6 of them confirmed as audiobooks on Spotify or Apple Books — including A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Camera Lucida, and Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Full availability across Spotify, Apple Books, Audible, and Amazon is below.