Response to "Death of an Author"

Castrato= a male singer castrated in boyhood so as to retain a soprano or alto voice. The practice of castration was banned in 1903.

“The author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.” Pg. 41
• What were people called before the Middle Ages that wrote? It is interesting that the author emerged out of a time when religion was being questioned and knowledge was more accessible to poorer people. People were then allowed to think for themselves.

“...it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’.” Pg. 42
• How does the language perform without the author? We put the words in order to make sentences, paragraphs… why is writing impersonal? Most think of it as very personal.

(this guy is punctuation-happy)

“Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” Pg. 44
• I actually agree with this. Is you know who the author is or where the came from, you immediately judge or put a social context on that person, and then probably judge the writing that way as well. I once had a teacher that would not let us read about the author at all before reading the book.