2. “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text . . . to close the writing” (Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author). Write an essay either agreeing or disagreeing with Roland Barthes’ argument in his essay ‘The death of the Author’. Support your answer with reference to any poem not on the Leaving Cert or First Year English course.
In this essay I am going to give my opinions on the topic in Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”. Barthes’ argument, however well brought across, is a controversial one that raises a lot of questions with me, of which I am to discuss in this essay. My views on this topic are slightly similar to Barthes’ but I have many views and opinions of my own which I will talk about.
“To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing”, this is Barthes argument in “The Death of the Author”. He says that by giving a text an author, the text is somewhat closed to any interpretation by the reader. I agree completely with Barthes’ argument, giving a text an author does somewhat close the text to any analysis by the reader. However, I do feel that, the author has every right to claim their work, to say that they wrote the texts. I will however discuss Barthes’ argument, exploring different aspects of it and expressing my own analysis and judgment.
In my opinion I think that Barthes’ argument is indeed a good one but I don’t necessarily believe that authors have to conceal their identity and I do feel it a shame that some authors feel they do have to do so. A recent case where I saw such a thing was with the now well-known Harry Potter Author, J.K Rowling, who at the start of her career felt she had to conceal her gender, in the fear that she would not receive as much recognition for her work for simply being female. However absurd this may sound, we all can see where she was coming from, female writers don’t receive as much recognition as men do,...