@lie-lichen replied to your post “honestly a lot of people who espouse death of the...”:

I haven't studied the humanities before, what's a formalist/new critic?

​well i'm definitely more of a lapsed scholar than authority. but formalism is an approach to reading focused on the formal structure of a text, its literary devices, etc. and often is explicitly anti-anything outside the text (author biography, historical context, anything not on the literal page). it's your language arts teacher making you diagram sentences or doing a whole lesson on rhyme schemes.

the New Critics were a group of critics (obvs) who took this approach, concentrated in the beginning of the 20th century. i found them via t.s. eliot's poetics & particularly his landmark criticism "hamlet and his problems," but the mid-century contributions of other critics like Wimsatt & Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" (reconstructing the author based on the text) also shaped criticism to come after. close reading as a standard component of literary education is very much their legacy.

barthes' "death of the author" essay is pop culture famous because it's funny and pithy and has a name that you can read and assume you know what it's about, even if you're going to be wrong in so many of the details. the essay is not concerned with the author as active, present word of god dictating the interpretation of the text after releasing it unto the world; he very clearly states his objection to the idea that "[t]he Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book," a historical origin which produces the text - not an authority figure professing edicts. he actually makes a bunch of jokes about how the new critics were bad, because this is firmly espousing the Birth of the Reader - and so, the birth of reader-response criticism, which i think was a net negative for culture. tbqh.

if you read the damn thing you begin to wonder if this is not one big joke, as well, or at least a very contemporary modern joke as it ends with him claiming that Readers are "without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" - a statement so boldly uninquisitive and contradictory to the level of logic being applied in the paragraphs before that it has to be, in its deliberate obtuseness, a commentary on other commentaries.

so my beef with people whose entire comment can be "Death of the Author!!! QED" is that they think it's a material fact and not a historically-produced and dialectical position in a larger centuries upon centuries long argument about how we read and derive/make/produce/wot ever verb meaning. the petty infighting of critique movements is fun and historically informative i prommy. this is not abt word of god i swear