CoP Seminar - Animation and Authership

In this CoP seminar we read through a piece of text called 'The Death of The Author' by a writer named Roland Barthes, which in my opinion is a really complicated piece of text to read. Through the seminar we talked about what being an author meant, and them being like a film maker/artist in there own right. We took a closer look into the piece of text with our tutor, and he explained what some bits of text meant.

Death of the author came out to public in 1977, however it was written a couple of years before this. The Death of the author is about how the reader takes over from the writer and then in there own words tell other people what the book is about. For example in the text Roland Barthes quotes "The removal of the author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or - which is the same thing - the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent)." (Barthes. R, 1986, pg. 145).

Barthes believed that "culmination of capitalist ideology which has attached the greatest importance to the "person" of the author" (Barthes.R, 1968, pg. 143) this leads to the reader trying to understand the work from the authors point of view, instead of the reader trying to make sense of it there selves. Also once the reader has the authors work the author can not do anything to direct the readers opinions or thoughts but can inspirer them by the words and language they use in their work, "it is language which speaks, not the author" (Barthes.R, 1968, pg. 143) meaning the reader has the opportunity to make of it what they will with the authors work being the beginning of there interpretation. However, in todays society individuals are allowed to go on forums to comment on other peoples work and leave their own interpretation and this helps the reader to come up with their own perception of the world, as they see many perceptions of the world in one place. This completely cuts out the meaning the author gave to his work, and as Londow commented that "hypertext... infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting that portion to the reader" (Landow.G, 1992, pg. 90) which both as giving of the impression that the reader is just as important as the author.

This also relates to animation because as the creative individual you have to let the audience react in their own way and have their own interpretation to the animation. As Barthes also mentions the nothing is completely original in the first place because more often or not the author/creative individual themselves have been influenced by someone else earlier.


Barthes,R. (1968) "Death of the Author" in Image Music Text, (1977), London, Fontana Press

Landow,G.P. (1992) "Re-configuring the Author" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and technology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.