Collection: Dead Authors

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) announced the "death of the author" in his 1967 essay, which inaugurated a postmodern approach to interpretation that demoted intention and biography in favour of social context and intertextuality. The death of the author was, purportedly, the "birth of the reader," foreshadowing the idea of reading, consumption, and—dare we say it—"curation" as modes of production in themselves.

Barthes' text is often read in conjunction with "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," a 1935 essay by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) that famously heralds the decline of the artistic "aura" (of uniqueness, originality) in the face of modern mass media. According to Benjamin, this phenomenon laid the groundwork for the "aestheticization of politics" inherent to fascism. He called for the politicization of art in response.

Both Benjamin and Barthes appear in this collection, among other authors, who are all literally dead. All of them advanced a critical, meta-literary approach to writing, sometimes speculative and politically engaged, other times purely imaginative and introspective. 

Who is the author who has died? A white, male one, mostly—representative of the formerly unassailable authority of colonial patriarchy. Hence the dusty, bookish, old-world melancholy that adheres to many of the dead white men in this collection (especially Borges—that spectre haunting the library). The postmodern break opened up the canon for a wider diversity of voices and perspectives. The writers in this collection, however, were never part of the literary mainstream—rather, they were members of that marginal counter-tradition (or its descendants) who either critiqued modernity from within or pushed outward from its fissures.