1967: The Birth of “The Death of the Author”

Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is a foundational text for scholars who are addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership in English studies and its neighboring disciplines. Barthes’s essay is typically presented without significant attention to the circumstances and context surrounding its initial English publication in 1967 (not in 1968, as is often stated). This project works to better understand that context, and thereby to better understand Barthes’s argument. Although it has often been claimed that Barthes’s essay has a “revolutionary spirit,” this spirit is not directly political in nature. Rather, it is grounded in an artistic revolution that was producing sophisticated multimedia well before digital tools made multimedia commonplace.