Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes demonstrate themselves to be divergent thinkers and writers with the ideas they present in their lectures and writings. Their compelling critiques inspired the ideas of esteemed writers such as Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, along with students all over the world. Foucault and Barthes also expand upon and modify the ideas of others and were, themselves, influenced by revolutionary theorists. Some notable examples of this is how Karl Marx affected the writing of Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and how Charles Darwin affected Roland Barthes’ “From Work to Text”. Foucault applied Marx’s methods of thinking when it came to questioning the concept of what an author is, and Barthes’ thoughts of considering
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It has been thought by many to be a response that addresses and expands upon Roland Barthes’ “The Death of an Author” (1967). In the lecture, Foucault tackles many transcendental topics regarding theories of literature. He poses questions about what constitutes a work from a text (another nod to Barthes), and delves into many discussions of how big a role he believes an author plays when discussing the overall message that a text can portray. References to Marx are fed throughout the lecture, indicating that Foucault had studied him and his theories extensively, leading a reader to believe that concept’s of Marx’s ways of thinking could have had some influence on Foucault. “I wanted to locate the rules that formed a certain number of concepts and theoretical relationships in (Marx’s) works,” (Foucault, …show more content…
He commends contemporary writers for their attempts at seeing the position of the capacity of the author in a new light. Instead of taking the Romantic ideology that critics in the past had done and making continuous efforts to discover the emotional connections between the author and their writings, contemporary writers have dedicated themselves more to looking at what the text says about itself. “It is not restricted to the confines of interiority… we recognize it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier,” (Foucault, 1477). Foucault advocates that readers and critics should renounce the necessary duty to examine an author and their relation to their works, but rather consider them as the messenger for their texts, who through their form can speak for
It has been thought by many to be a response that addresses and expands upon Roland Barthes’ “The Death of an Author” (1967). In the lecture, Foucault tackles many transcendental topics regarding theories of literature. He poses questions about what constitutes a work from a text (another nod to Barthes), and delves into many discussions of how big a role he believes an author plays when discussing the overall message that a text can portray. References to Marx are fed throughout the lecture, indicating that Foucault had studied him and his theories extensively, leading a reader to believe that concept’s of Marx’s ways of thinking could have had some influence on Foucault. “I wanted to locate the rules that formed a certain number of concepts and theoretical relationships in (Marx’s) works,” (Foucault, …show more content…
He commends contemporary writers for their attempts at seeing the position of the capacity of the author in a new light. Instead of taking the Romantic ideology that critics in the past had done and making continuous efforts to discover the emotional connections between the author and their writings, contemporary writers have dedicated themselves more to looking at what the text says about itself. “It is not restricted to the confines of interiority… we recognize it in its exterior deployment. This reversal transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier,” (Foucault, 1477). Foucault advocates that readers and critics should renounce the necessary duty to examine an author and their relation to their works, but rather consider them as the messenger for their texts, who through their form can speak for