The Death And Return Of The Author

In this now classic study, Sean Burke further explores the challenges faced by an authorial theory and revisits the enigmatic borderlines between life and work, life and (authorial) death.

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author," argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text. Hailing "the birth of the reader," Barthes posits a new abstract notion of the reader as the conceptual space containing all the text’s possible meanings. The essay has become one of the most cited works in literary criticism and is a key text for any reader approaching reader response theory.

Abstract:

It began in 1968 when Roland Barthes published The Death of the Author? and picked up steam the next year with Michel Foucault's What Is An Author? Together they posited that authors were no longer important, and even repressive in interpretation. Irwin (philosophy, King's College, Pennsylvania) begins with translations of these two essays, and reprints 11 others to demonstrate the supporters and opponents of the notion. c. Book News Inc.

In this three-part book-length study of the work of Gregg Toland, Philip Cowan explores approaches to co-authorship in collaborative filmmaking to propose new ways of identifying, attributing, and evaluating the creative work of cinematographers. In the first part of the study, Cowan challenges the dominant, director-centered auteur approach to film studies, critiquing the historical development of authorship theory and providing a contemporary analysis of the cinematographer’s authorial role in creating images that communicate meaning through content and construction. By synthesizing and updating the work of previous film theorists to define the complexities of composition, movement, and lighting in the second part of the study, Cowan develops a new, comprehensive taxonomy of functional and aesthetic elements of the moving image. Finally, by using the co-author approach and the analytical tools developed in part two of the book, Cowan provides an in-depth re-examination of Toland’s work, highlighting the historical neglect of the cinematographer’s artistic contribution to filmmaking and developing a fresh approach to the analysis of contemporary cinematography in film.

After Words investigates how the suicide of an author informs critical interpretations of the author's works. Suicide itself is a form of authorship as well as a revision, both on the part of the author, who has written his or her final scene and revised the `natural' course of his or her life, and on the part of the reader, who must make sense of this final act of writing. Elizabeth Leake focuses on twentieth-century Italian writers Guido Mor-selli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi, examining personal correspondence, diaries, and obituaries along with popular and academic commemorative writings to elucidate the ramifications of the authors' suicides for their readership. She argues that authorial suicide points to the limitations of those critical stances that exclude the author from the practice of reading. In this innovative and accessible assessment of some of the key issues of authorship, Leake shows that in the aftermath of suicide, an author's life and death themselves become texts to be read.