The ideas presented by Roland Barthes in his famous "The Death of the Author" drew as much influence as they did criticism. Many thinkers took the death of the author to heart while others sought to show why it is wrong and the author still lives.
Commonalities
The ideas presented in The Death of the Author were to some anticipated extent by the literary school called New Criticism. The New Criticism precept about “intentional fallacy” declares that a poem does not belong to its author; rather, had its meaning beyond the author's control.
Barthes' work has much in common with the ideas of the Yale
school of Deconstruction in the 1970s, although they were not inclined to see
the meaning as the production of the reader. Barthes, like the
deconstructionists, insists on the disjointed nature of the texts, their cracks
in meaning and their incongruities, interruptions and ruptures.
Michel Foucault also addresses the question of the author in critical interpretation. In his 1969 essay "What is an Author?" he develops the idea of “authorship” to explain the author as a classifying principle within a particular discursive formation. Foucault does not mention Barthes in his essay, but his analysis is seen as a challenge to Barthes' description of a historical progression that frees the reader from the author's domination. Jacques Derrida paid ironic homage to La Mort de l'auteur in his essay Les Morts de Roland Barthes.
Thinkers associated with Feminism and the gay rights movement find an anti-patriarchal, anti-traditional pathos of destruction in Barth's work . In their reading, this essay is directed not only against a stable literary-critical interpretation, but also against a stable self-identification.
Critique of The Death of the Author
In the satirical essay Roland Barthes' Resurrection of the Author and Redemption of Biography JC Carlier (a pseudonym of Cedric Watts, argues that the essay The Death of the Author is the litmus test of critical competence. Those who take it at face value automatically fail this test; those who take it ironically and recognize a work of fine satirical fiction are the ones who pass the test.
Read more about the Philosophy of Roland Barthes and a simple explanation of the Death of the Author.
Here you can find a comparison of Barthes's "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's "What is an Author?"
