[SYMPOSIUM] BOOK CLUB
#4 Barthes: The Death of the Author

Friday, 12 February 2016, 6:00pm – 8:30pm
The Field, 385 Queens Road, London SE14 5HD
Rail/Overground: New Cross Gate, Queens Road Peckham
Chaired by Henrietta Ross
Free, please book your place

Considering the reader, context, authority and authenticity this session will focus on Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay The Death of the Author: its influence on a contemporary understanding of cultural production and the role of the individual with in it.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture… a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (Barthes, 1977, pp. 146, 148)

DOWNLOAD: Barthes, Roland (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text, Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, pp. 142-148.

Suggested further reading

Barthes, Roland (1993). Authors and Writers. In A Barthes Reader, Susan Sontag ed. New York: Vintage, pp. 185-193.

Benjamin, Walter (1986/1934). The Author as Producer. In Reflections. New York: Schocken, pp. 220-238.

Burke, Sean (1998). Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes. Edinburgh University Press.

Foucault, Michel (1977). What is an Author? In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald F. Bouchard ed. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 113-138.

Karshan, Thomas (2009). Deaths of the Authors. Frieze, Issue 125, September 2009.

Ranciere, Jacques (2007). The Emancipated Spectator. Artforum 45/7, March 2007, pp. 271-280.

Wuggenig, Ulf (2004). Burying the Death of the Author. Republicart.