The Rise of Theory and the Death of the Author

Abstract

This chapter argues that the 1960s, or more specifically 1967, could be regarded as the moment of the rise of the phrase “death of the author” which, as a critical concept, was associated predominantly with three key players: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. They challenged the foundation, as they saw it, on which modern intellectual Western history, at least since Descartes, had been built, including its assumptions concerning the subjective origins of the work of art in the mind of the artist or author. In contextualising the preoccupation in fiction of this period with questions around and challenges to the concept of authorship and creativity, understanding the historical trajectory of this critical moment in the rise of theory is of cardinal significance in recognising the specific conceptual frameworks of authorship provided by critics and theorists. Even before the critical debate emerged explicitly with questions of authorship at its centre, fictional writers had already begun to foreground a sense of threat to formerly secure conceptualisations grounded in liberal and Romantic concepts of subjectivity. This engaged not only fundamental philosophical assumptions, but also equally crucial political questions around gender, ownership and identities that pointed towards what would become postmodernism.