ENGL 200 Lecture Notes - Metonymy, Roland Barthes
Document Summary
The main point of the essay is to address the difficulty of knowing the author"s text. In barthes" opinion, the author dies, we shall never know what the intention of the author was, and ultimately, its not important. It"s all about the context and the interpretation of the decoder, or the receiver of the work. Essentially, we are removing ourselves from the authorship and working to re-write from our own perspective, the author"s words are simply a canvas for that interpretation. Next week ask: why haven"t more authors given written interpretations to the receivers of the written word. We must kill the author in order to take an open look at the text we are absorbing. Essentially, as long as you keep the context of the writer around, you cannot see the many different meanings and will simply look at the one viewpoint. Now when we remove the author, real writing may begin.
