Return to Saussure

Introduction Roland Barthes’s declaration of “the death of the author” has often been interpreted as a radical rejection of authorship itself, as if modern literary theory had discovered that writers no longer mattered. According to this interpretation, Barthes simply replaces the figure of the creative individual with an impersonal system of signs and reduces literature to the anonymous functioning of language. Yet this reading overlooks the intellectual path that leads to the phrase. The death of the author is not an isolated attack on literary creation, nor is it a sudden celebration of the disappearance of human agency. It is the consequence of a much earlier transformation in the understanding of language, subjectivity, and writing. For centuries, literature was largely governed by an expressive model of writing. The author ( auteur ) was imagined as the origin of meaning: an interior self possessed experiences, thoughts, emotions, or truths, and language served as the instrum...