I have to add some extra context to this b/c I’m a big Roland Barthes fan and also I think I can add some Fun Nuance!!
“New criticism” isn’t the source of the phrase “The Death of the Author”. “The Death of the Author” is the title of an essay by Barthes from 1967 (after the heyday of new criticism). In the essay, Barthes even mentions “new criticism” and says that it “should be overthrown”, because he’s French, and therefore dramatic. It’s worth noting that people use phrase “Death of the Author” as a catch-all for the entire school of thought that @ariaste talked about. Which is fine, that’s what happens to catchy phrases, but it’s also why I’m making this point–
The actual “Death of the Author” is argument much more complicated, and probably more extreme, than the title suggests. The essay’s only like six pages long but it’s super hard to understand (to the point where some people apparently think it’s sarcastic, which is honestly possible. It’s that kind of befuckery). The essay is deeply wrapped up in Barthes’ other disciplines, in semiotics, surrealism, French modernist writing, post-structuralism, and Balzac. It’s pretty fucking bonkers, but there’s three important things I want to add directly from that essay.
1) The meaning of any one piece of writing is up to the reader (Barthes says “the unity of a text is in its destination”). That means, first of all, that no one poem or book has one answer or one theme - every piece of writing contains multitudes. Multiple interpretations, multiple “paths’ through to understanding. And that means that not only are all understandings of a text valid, but they’re all equal. I think @ariaste sort of gestured to that, but just to underline; in the car metaphor, we all get a copy of the car, and we all get to fuck with it and drive it where we want, but we also have to understand the sheer potential in the cars we get. It could always be something else, in somebody else’s hands. If a question strikes you as wrong, it’s the wrong question for you; not necessarily For All Time.
However, I also don’t think Barthes means that ‘every interpretation of a text, no matter how purposefully fuckin stupid, is valid’. He does understand individual texts as A Thing with some internal logic- “a tissue of citations” from “a thousand sources”. Miyazaki is an interesting guy to bring up in this conversation because there’s all those debates about how “Spirited Away is about child prostitution” “NO IT’S NOT Miyazaki SAID it WASN’T”. While I don’t personally gravitate to the “child prostitution” interpretation, there’s a lot to be said about the film’s portrayal of child labor. I totally get how you could come to the child prostitution conclusion, and if that’s a useful thing for you as a reader to think about, go for it. What Miyazaki said doesn’t really matter in debunking that interpretation.
But you probably couldn’t say that Spirited Away is actually about the 2018 FIFA World Cup, because that’s not one of the film’s thousand sources.
2) Barthes is…really trying to do something pretty aggressive in Death of the Author:
“By refusing to assign to the text a “secret”, that is, an ultimate meaning, [literature] liberates an activity which we might call…properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”
To translate French Philosopher Speak into Humanspeak, what he means is that resisting the idea of ‘a singular truth’ in any context is a revolutionary activity. If there’s no one law, no one God, no one truth, there can be no one authority - no single bourgeois sphere defining good taste, no single oppressive ruler dictating what is good and what is right.
In other words, your furious determination to find queer subtext, or, for that matter, your determination to read characters as asexual regardless of other people’s thoughts - that’s anti-authoritarian in principle and I think that’s pretty rad???
(fun fact: Mr. Death of the Author himself was gay, and would absolutely support your 130k Stucky coffee shop AU)
3) Regardless of the useful stuff you can pull from “Death of the Author”, here’s the most important thing to remember about it - it’s not a universal truth (because there’s no such thing as universal truth, just like “Death of the Author” itself says, wink wonk).
Barthes is advocating for the way things should be done. If you genuinely think that “Death of the Author” prevents you from doing something useful with a text, you’re not necessarily wrong - you’re just disagreeing with Roland Barthes.
I tend to agree with Barthes about 90% of the way. I do think the meaning of a text is largely created by readers once it’s out in the world. I do think readers have more say in the meaning of a text than authorial intent does. This mode of thought is great for queer scholars. It’s great for cinema studies and game studies (because films and games rarely have a singular author anyway).
But there are a few fundamental ways in which the writer of a text will always matter, at least cosmetically and contextually - if only so you know what it means when someone in an 18th century letter references a “computer”. In that case you have to acknowledge the writer’s time period. Furthermore Barthes is not necessarily thinking about whether it’s important if an author is queer or not, or a woman or not, etc., etc. He’s out for the blood of the mainstream critics, not the marginalized, so those more down-to-earth minute-to-minute discussions of “should white people write about people of colour and if so how” simply aren’t addressed in Barthes’ argument. Barthes is definitely Taking a Position here, and in order to be dramatically persuasive he’s dropping a bit of nuance.
So I guess my advice is like - Use Theory Responsibly? Employ it when it’s helpful, understand it on its own terms, Discard it when it begins to Create Problems. And, like, be gay, pine for people, write sad poems, and especially write fun pastichey fanfic, and you’ll make Barthes proud.
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