Abstract
The death of the Author can be dated with some precision. It happened, according to the undertaker, Roland Barthes, in 1967, and the news spread through France just in time to endorse the wild student wakes of the following year. In the United States, the Author was undoubtedly one casualty of the Vietnam War. Inside and outside universities, authority would never again command the same respect, and the letters of the name of the Author clearly fit into the script of authoritative and even authoritarian authorisations. No wonder that critics soon laid the Author to rest. He had been ailing, in fact, for almost a century, stricken by a disease inherited from his Father, the Author of all things and the Logos itself, whose death had been proclaimed by Nietzsche in 1882. The virus invaded all the cells of meaning, undermining the principle that some point of origin — Logos, first cause, God, a transcendental signified, or merely the mind of a writer — could guarantee the interpretation of a text or a world. Now, in the 1960s, a superfluity of meaningless meanings overloaded the system. And so the Author died.
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Notes
Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 174.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. D. E Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 138.
Keats’s letter to J. A. Hessey, 8 October 1818. I have explored this creation in The Life of the Poet (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Heidegger’s critique of the humanistic tradition is most searching in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947), Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 193–242.
‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ (1832), in Thomas Carlyle’s Works (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), vol. 6, p. 296.
Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology: Letters & Samuel Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 20, 105.
John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, quoted in The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the ‘Life of Johnson’, ed. Marshall Waingrow (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 61 n.
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. by L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), vol. 1, p. 265.
Samuel Johnson The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), vol. 3, p. 207.
Ibid., p. 235. ‘With all this haughty contempt of gentility, no praise was more welcome to Dr. Johnson than that which [said he] had the notions or manners of a gentleman’ (Mrs Piozzi, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill [Oxford: Clarendon, 1897], vol. I, pp. 253–4.
To Thomas Warton, 1 February 1755, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 92.
Mathiæ Casimiri Sarbievii, Lyricorum Libri IV (Cambridge, 1684), Ode 3, p. 10.
Rambler, p. 37; Johnson’s Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), vol. 3, p. 204.
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© 1998 Lawrence Lipking
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Lipking, L. (1998). The Birth of the Author. In: Gould, W., Staley, T.F. (eds) Writing the Lives of Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_3
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