Roland Barthes and Kiese Laymon: Can the Author Truly ‘Die’ in a Memoir? Megan Schaffner College

Devoted to the concept of text, or écriture, French theorist Roland Barthes departs from academic criticism’s emphasis on the author (Leitch 1317) in his essay “The Death of the Author” and reorients his focus on the construction and content of the written work itself. Barthes insists that it is impossible for readers to know who is speaking in a text. He argues that “writing is the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the writing body” (1322). Throughout his work, he reiterates the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author” (1323), claiming that the author has no control over a written work after it is constructed and that, therefore, searching for the author’s intention is futile. According to Barthes, by accepting the metaphorical death of the author, the reader becomes free to examine a work without the constraints of the author’s predetermined meaning. This action, in his view, transforms a text from “a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning” to “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,...