Better late than never (part 1)

The whole idea of the author being dead feels right to me. As strange as that sounds, I never went to the bookstore to pick out a book to read, and go straight to my favorite author’s books. The name of the author has been generally irrelevant to me in the books that I like. In high school, we only read the books that were by well-known authors; we studied the writing styles of authors such as Dickens, and Hemmingway. I never felt the need to study the author; I always just wanted to study the story and the characters of the text. I am fascinated by the way we can relate to people who do not exist in the real world and how the story is brought to life by the language of the book.

So, when I was reading Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, the phrase that struck a cord with me was when he was referring to Mallarme and said, “It is language which speaks, not the author”. The author is just the person who came up with the words, but the language is the story. We do not need to know the history of the author to understand the characters and the plot of literature. Ideas can stand by themselves, and they do not need a physical being to hold an idea. The words are enough.

I felt like Barthes helped me understand this idea of the dead author, and I was able to grasp it well.

More to come once I go deeper into the blogging world.