The Death of the Author

While the essay is still much read and revered by many critics and scholars today, it is important to read it in the context of its historical moment. The late 1960s was a period of great questioning of authority, particularly by young people. In May 1968, there was a seven-week period of civil uprising in France that included labor strikes and college students protesting the dominant cultural authority of universities and government control over them. Protests targeted various forms of social injustice, but special targets of the student-led movement were capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism (particularly that associated with the United States’ war in Vietnam). Barthes is explicit in his essay that capitalism has much to do with the culture of the individual, which gave rise to the “author” as a source of textual authority. His reference to the “empire of the author”—which his essay clearly tends to overthrow, resonates with the anti-imperialism antiauthoritarianism of popular movements in France and the West at the time.