Page 115 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 106

Contemporary Cultural Theory

attempt by ‘modern literature . . . to substitute the instance of
discourse for the instance of reality (or of the referent), which has
been, and still is, a mythical “alibi” dominating the idea of liter-
ature’ (p. 144). For Barthes, as for Jakobson, an apparently
descriptive aesthetic rapidly acquired prescriptive capacity.
Barthes’ much quoted essay on the death of the author insisted
that literary texts be understood in terms of intertextuality rather
than supposed authorial intentions. The essay itself was intended
as a polemic against the more traditionally humanist view of the
writer as author (literally, the source) of literary meaning.
Formally, Barthes recognised the reader as the point where inter-
textual meaning can finally become focused: the reader, he wrote,
is the ‘someone who holds together in a single field all the traces
by which the written text is constituted’. But this reader was still
‘without history, biography, psychology’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 148).
That is, Barthes was concerned not so much with the empirically
concrete reader as with the structural role of the reader, to borrow
a phrase from Eco (Eco, 1981). Barthes’ structuralism was thus
concerned not with the intrinsic properties of the text, but with
the conventions that render it intelligible to the reader. This
intelligibility is, however, a function of the discourse itself, rather
than of any individual reader’s capacities and interests. The
entire argument, which became extremely influential both in
France and elsewhere, was informed by a rigorous theoretical
anti-humanism, in no way belied by its rhetorical conclusion that
‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
Author’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 148).

Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco, Professor of Semiotics at the University of
Bologna, occupied a roughly analogous position within Italian
semiotics to that of Barthes in French semiology. Perhaps Italy’s
most renowned contemporary intellectual, Eco has enjoyed an
unusual status as both a celebrated cultural critic and a world-
famous author. But the enthusiastic reception of his first novel,
The Name of the Rose (Eco, 1994), merely enhanced the reputa-
tion of a career that had ranged from medieval aesthetics to

106