There's a reply to Lommano below, but first: All theorizing aside, western culture isn't really prepared for the death of the author. I certainly am not, and I don't think anybody I know is. Giving up the author means giving up a whole lot more than biographical readings of texts and the idea that the author meant his text to mean something. Foucault touches on this when he notes that the dead author tends to be replaced with an "author function." Whether we ascribe meaning to the author's intentions or to Reason, science and law ("God and his hypostases") is no matter; an author is more that just an individual who writes literature; it's any source of meaning, any meta-entity used to confine the old freeplay of the signifier. To kill the author, you need to do a lot more than the theoryhead undergrad who blithely dispenses with Charlotte Bronte on his way to his Victorian Novel class. The figure of the author, now deceased or deceasing, starts with the creation of the individual in the west. Barthes associates this moment (or moments) with "English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the reformation"--these are the movements that took note of the importance of the individual and the individual opinion. People can think and have their own ideas...they can synthesize empiracle data in an objective fashion without the mediation of some qualified figure like a priest or a parent, and thus they are individuals. Thus, also, they can be writers. They can have something to say. They can mean something. This is the basis not only of capitalism, but most western thinking since the late Middle Ages and especially since the Enlightenment. Are we really ready to give this up? The death of the author imports the death of the individual, ultimately, and we're not ready to do that. Sure, Barthes distinguishes between utterances "intended" (the paradox continues) to affect reality and utterances "narrated" no longer with that intention--that is, he recognizes that certain modes of speaking and writing *do* have intentions, such as perhaps me saying "hand me that copy of _Sarrasine_ over there," or "look out for that copy of Sarrsine that's about to land on your head," which both aim to alter the physical relationship of the contents of the immediate space, but that "literature" especially isn't designed to act **directly** on reality. Sure, Barthes distinguishes between the two. But to unravel the thread of the author is to tear loose the thread of the individual. A lot of people think this is a good, desirable thing to do. But people don't generally think about what they're getting into. Barthes himself notes the distinction between "lisible" (or "readerly") texts and "scriptible" (or "writerly") texts. The author is dead, as it were, but some authors are more dead than others. This is a sign that we aren't quite ready to recognize any corpses. It quickly becomes an all-or-nothing kind of gesture. Poststructuralsim (post Barthes-ism??) seems to recognize the full range of implications in the death of the author, finishing what Barthes started to say. > My main question here is, where does that leave Salinger's unread > manuscripts? Can a text truly be "written" if no one is around to read > it (kind of a spin on the tree-falling-in-the-woods question)? Okay, but isn't the author a reader, too, just once, as he writes the story? Scriptor and reader at once? A text's unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination....but origin and destination are one and the same, that only time. -- Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu