A genealogical approach to the concept of the “Death of the author”

Abstract

This article presents a genealogical approach to the concept of the death of the author developed by Roland Barthes towards the end of the 1960s. Such a concept is the starting point of authorship studies, which have shown a sustained interest in literary studies in countries such as France or the United States; as such, they have begun to make their way into the Latin American academic context in Argentina and Mexico. Despite authorship studies developing as early as the late twentieth century, they have only consolidated over the course of the twenty-first century, constituting a relevant and growing investigative field. As we will see, its study rekindles both literary and critical theory’s twentieth-century debates that were believed to be settled. Given the scarcity of national academic studies regarding this subject, we suggest a few elements in order to construct a genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense, of the theoretical concept that gives rise to those: the death of the author. By doing this, we hope to contribute to our academic environment’s knowledge around the genesis of authorship studies and to propose scenarios for its discussion, investigative development, and application to Colombian literature’s research material.