The author enters his own death, writing begins. (Barthes 1977, p. 142)
Seminal work in the late twentieth-century by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault has defined much of the recent discourse surrounding authorship. But when Barthes declared the author dead, the opposite happened, and there was a massive resurgence of interest in the figure. Now, with the continual rise of auto-fiction and experimentation with memoir, how can we reaffirm authorial identity given these texts that seem to alter the form of author and their relationship to the text? And how can we better understand, and engage with, contemporary authorship through creative-critical practice?
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977)