Practicing the Death of the Author

The following quotations from Barthe’s essay “The Death of The Author,” will serve as guides for composing a practical lesson plan.

- “who is speaking thus”
- “writing is the destruction of every voice”
- “ writing is a neutral composite space where our subject slips away”
- “an author does not exist prior to or outside of language”
- “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified”
- “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
- “ A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, contestations, but there is one place this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader not … the author.”



Experimental micro-lesson plan

Objectives
- To reinforce students’ personal interpretation of poetry. (recreating the text through the act of reading)
- To help students to free themselves from the limits imposed by the author, and to give them the chance discover new meanings rather than those intended by the author.
- To let students set out their own understanding of the characteristics of the voice in the poem of discussion depending on their reading of the text not on the author’s biography.
- To ask students to write down the inter-textuality brought to their minds by the text.

Methodology
- Students will read Ben Jonson’s “ON MY FIRST SON” in groups of four.

1 FAREWELL, thou child of my right hand, and joy,
2 My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
3 Seven years th' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
4 Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
5 O, I could lose all father now. For why
6 Will man lament the state he should envy?
7 To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
8 And, if no other misery, yet age?
9 Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
10 Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;
11 For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
12 As what he loves may never like too much.

- The poem will be presented without the name of the poet or the time of writing.
- Students will be required to discuss the following questions:
What do you thing the meaning of the poem is?
What is your personal interpretation of the first and tenth lines?
Does it remind you of any other literary text (inter-textuality)? What are the facets of similarity?
What are the characteristic of the voice in the poem.? What are the textual signs or details that made you think so?
- students should be provided with the intended meaning of the author, and should be asked to compare it to their own interpretation.

Check this interseting critique of " the death of the Author" http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibss5.html