The Death of the Author:Past and Present

Some people claim that the death of the author is a twentieth-century issue. They think that it was initiated for the first time by Roland Barthes in 1968 and consolidated by M. Foucault and others. The objective is to manipulate this information as a justification for establishing a radical discontinuity between Modern Literary Theory and Traditional Criticism. This assumption, however, does not stand to reason. The critical establishment has always maintained that literary ubiquity is possible only through the authorial anonymity. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T.S. Eliot demonstrates in detail that the man of letters is a mere catalyst and that impersonality is the differentia specifica of literariness. Similarly, Wimsatt and Beardsley reiterate, in “The Intentional Fallacy”, that any form of attention devoted to the author can be anything such as biography or psychology, but it can never be literary criticism. All the elements needed by the work of art are already in it. The symmetrical similarities between the traditional and the modern positions establish the fact that the death of the author is one of the continuities, past and present, in the literary institution.