ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes was a French philosopher and linguist most noted for his work on the structures of texts. His secondary education took place in Paris at the Lycee Montaigne followed by the Lycee Louis-Grand. He then moved on to study classics, grammar, and philology at the Sorbonne. Barthes wrote "The Death of the Author" while he was the Director of Studies at Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He was always interested in moving between academia and popular culture. In "The Death of the Author" Barthes argues that we should stop seeing the "real person" who wrote a book as important. Reading "The Death of the Author" is a good way to think more critically about how we perform literary analyses. Barthes's replacement of the traditional term "author" with "the scriptor" is one example of such an idea. Barthes's abstract notion of "the reader" is also different from many other reader-response theorists.
