Lampas - Volume 55, Issue 4, 2022

The French literary critic Roland Barthes made a notorious attempt in the 1960s to declare the author of literary texts dead. His essay became a true classic in literary and cultural studies. This article places ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) in its intellectual and historical context. First, I will look at the extent to which the essay relates to the thematic issue on minimalism of the American periodical in which it first appeared. Secondly, I will discuss a few seminal ideas of the essay, including a largely overlooked paradox in its argumentation: its strong emphasis on quotations from literary authors to substantiate the claim that the literary author must no longer be used as an argument of authority in text interpretation. I will connect Barthes’s plea for the birth of the reader to his polemic in the 1960s with the literary scholar Raymond Picard about the role of the reader in literary criticism. Lastly, I will relate Barthes’s plea for the reader to his reception of antiquity, more specifically his life-long fascination with Greek tragedy and Nietzsche as sources of inspiration to reflect upon the mechanisms of literary language. I will conclude by commenting upon the theoretical use and the self-conscious temporality of Barthes’s essay.

This article starts from the tendency of ancient critics to ascribe utterances of characters to authors. This, it is argued, is not simply a conflation, but an expression of a view of narration which is distinct from our model of it. Instead of envisaging different narrative levels that are clearly separated from each other, ancient authors and readers viewed the author as impersonating characters in direct speech. This ancient view is closely linked to the salience of oral performance, in which the speaker either adopts the voice of the author or that of characters, and, more broadly, to the idea that the author has to re-enact the actions of his characters in his phantasia. The argument of this paper illustrates an approach to ancient narrative that complements the dominant narratological approach: after the application of categories forged chiefly in readings of the modern novel has let us appreciate the modern features of ancient texts, it is time to become more sensitive to the distinct nature of narrative and its conception in antiquity.

In this paper I take a look at two lyric poems: fragment 31 of Sappho and fragment 130B of Alcaeus. The first-person speakers in these two poems were commonly identified with their authors in antiquity. I argue that this was not the case when the poems were first performed on Lesbos. For the original audience these first-person speakers were general and would not necessarily have been identified with either Sappho or Alcaeus. Other people on Lesbos who performed these poems as songs could identify with them as well. It was only when the poems left the island and were reperformed in cities like Athens that the gap between first-person speaker and performer became so great that the question arose who the first-person speaker might have been. He or she was then identified with Sappho and Alcaeus, and the author, as the autobiographical subject of his or her poetry, was born.

The Appendix Vergiliana is a heterogeneous collection of pseudo-Vergilian poems, consisting in part of primary pseudepigrapha, i.e. poems that self-consciously create the illusion of Vergilian authorship (especially Culex and Catalepton). For centuries, scholarship on these poems has been dominated by the question of authenticity. In the wake of New Criticism, Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), however, classical scholars have grown to understand and appreciate how these poems – regardless of who actually wrote them – produce their ‘Vergil’, supplementing the master poet’s oeuvre, inserting themselves in his poetic biography, and casting him in the role of Homerus Romanus.

Until recently, scholars have mainly studied the autobiographical practices of Flavius Josephus to recover the life and thought of this Jewish author. The controversial aspects of Josephus’ life story have resulted in a clear bias of some scholars against this Jewish historian and doubts about his motives for writing so elaborately about his past. The present article breaks with this trend by offering a literary analysis of Josephus’ self-presentation as author of, and literary character in, the Life, an autobiographical text which was originally appended to the Jewish Antiquities. First, I discuss the nature of character (ἦθος) in ancient rhetoric and its potential relevance for interpreting historiographical texts. Using this interpretive framework, I examine several key passages from the Life – in particular the apologetic digression addressed to Justus and the inhabitants of Tiberias – and interpret these in light of the literary relationship of the Life with the Antiquities and the claims to authority Josephus advances in that text.

In this contribution I study Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels. I link Ferrante’s own pseudonymity with the way in which the classical author Vergil is represented in the series. An important theme in the novels is the appropriation of a female subjectivity by male authors. This theme features most prominently in the relation between Vergil and Queen Dido. Dido is a Leitmotif in Ferrante’s tetralogy: she is both a role model and an anti-model for the female protagonists, and the unconventional reading they give to her plays an important part throughout. Remarkably enough, Vergil is never mentioned as Dido’s ‘author’ whenever the protagonists discuss Dido. My suggestion is that Ferrante thus indicates that a text can only ever be open to interpretation once the author is ‘absent’ (or dead, in Barthes’ terms). Paradoxically, Vergil is precisely that, because he is such a classic: his text has become a reality on its own. This interpretation finds confirmation in the fact that Vergil does in fact occur in the novels, but only in the guise of Vergilius magus (the magician) of medieval legends. This shows that ‘biographical’ stories about authors do not necessarily have any relation to their work, nor help to interpret them: hence Ferrante’s own choice to be an absent author.