Death of the Author: Before and After
Keywords:
author, reader, function, dynamic, death, deconstructionAbstract
When Roland Barthes announced the death of the author in the 1960's, the sentence did not come as a surprise because he/she had been dying for a long time. This paper traces the process of his death by exploring his various functions as envisioned by critics and the fluctuating relation between him and the reader, a process that ended with the birth of the reader as a dynamic force in the making of the literary work. However, the rise of the reader has had its consequences which are not all happy as regards the integrity and value of literature as such.
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