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  • The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time
  • Jan Baetens
The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Jane Gallop. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, U.S.A., 2011. 184 pp. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5063-7; ISBN: 978-0-8223-5081-1.

"The Death of the Author" is the title of a brief 1968 essay by Roland Barthes that has become one of the most popular and often-quoted slogans of postmodernism in literary and cultural theory. Almost mantra-like, this shortcut postmodernist dismissal of the author and subsequent foregrounding of text, system, field and signifier has been used over and over again as a way of continuing the May 1968 revolt in France against tradition. Its academic reception has systematically linked this text with Michel Foucault's 1969 essay "What is an author." It is not an exaggeration to claim that Barthes's essay has achieved the status of a truly classic work.

Yet, it is one thing to recognize the value of a text and the concept it has put to the fore, and another thing to really read it. The starting point of Jane Gallop's book is that the easiness of the concept, which delivers a sexy and catchy meaning that we think we understand immediately, may have blocked our critical reflection on the notion as well as our reading of the very text that introduced it. The automatic coupling of Barthes's essay with the one by Foucault, which despite its similar title presents a totally different discussion, suggests already that there is a huge gap between the deceivingly simple concept and the abyss that its close reading can reveal to us. Jane Gallop is a stubborn practitioner of close reading, even in times like ours, in which there seems to be no place left for this approach in academy. Therefore, she delivers a twofold lesson in this important book. The first one is on the importance of close reading—and here the influence of Derrida, who transferred close reading from literature to philosophy and whose prestige has kept close reading present on the intellectual stage, is dramatically visible. The second one is on the meaning of the death of the author as a concept, but also as a practice—and here Gallop convincingly demonstrates that the significance of the concept cannot be reduced to its first reception in 1968.

In order to revisit the notion of the death of the author, Gallop adopts a method that is both extremely straightforward and tremendously subtle. On the one hand, she looks at how four key critics, first as readers and then as authors, have actually used that very notion. What did Barthes, for instance, write on the author after having declared that the author is dead? Did he delete the concept from his theory? Did he enjoy or lament it? Did he return to the author? Did he contradict himself? Did he react to the discussions raised by the success of his essay or did he ignore them? The answers that Jane Gallop offers to these questions painfully disclose that readers are often lazy. As it turns out, the death of the author is just a stepping-stone in Barthes's thinking on the position and role of the author. Moreover, his thinking on this relationship did not end in 1968—as we too easily accept it did. Instead of reading Barthes's essay in relationship with general theoretical and ideological statements, Gallop reconstructs the various links that help to discern the gradual shift to a different approach to the author, who becomes, according to Barthes, the object of an erotic dream by his or her reader. It is to the extent that we are aware of the author's death that it becomes possible to once again desire his or her presence in the body of the text. Focusing on a very small set of well-chosen fragments in Barthes's [End Page 305] work, fragments that are read and reread from a wide range of perspectives (the rhythm of the sentences, the multilayeredness of the metaphors, the conceptual variations, the play with a permanently...

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