Study Task 3

The overarching concept that Barthes is trying to communicate with this text is a question regarding who the author of a text truly is. Barthes outlines that the general consensus is for an author to claim that due to them writing said text, they have ownership of it and all the ideas conveyed. In Barthes point of view however, this is not the case. He theorizes that the whole notion of authorship deserves to be rethought, stating that the author is not the creator of a piece that they make. In fact, they have borrowed information from previous texts and ideas that have been made by someone else throughout history. This is made clear when Barthes writes, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Barthes is insinuating that it is not the writer that is the author, however it is the wealth of existing information already available combined with the interpretation the reader has which constitutes towards the authorship of a text. Barthes references the poet, Stéphane Mallarmé as she once said, “it is the language which speaks.”, this further emphasises his point about the context of a piece of writing and that the author is in the reader and not the writer.