The History of Bad Ideas: The Death of the Author

For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are the arbiters of what a text means has had a long and sometimes painful afterlife. As well as exploring its curious appeal and its persistent blindspots, Kathleen discusses her personal experience of how it can go wrong.

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Coming Next: Helen Lewis on Mesmerism

Coming Soon: The Great Political Fictions Part 2, starting with Middlemarch

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