Subjectivity, Textuality, and Intertextuality...

Subjectivity, Textuality, and Intertextuality from Structuralism to Post Structuralism: Unveiling Literary Freedom in Roland Barthes Discourse

Author Name : Rajib Majumder

ABSTRACT Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author" (1968) marks a significant shift "from structuralism to poststructuralism," celebrating the author's demise and introducing an era of emancipated freedom for the interpretation of literary texts (Barry 65). This perspective metamorphoses the text into an open-ended, polysemic discourse that embraces myriad meanings. Barthes advocates for the "essential verbal condition of literature," where the reader assumes the role of consolidating all traces, including intertextuality, which compose the written text (Leitch 1324-25). In his poststructuralist perspective, the coherence of a text lies not in its origin (the author) but in its destination (the reader). In subsequent essays such as "From Work to Text" (1971) and "The Pleasure of the Text" (1973), Barthes elaborates on his theory of text and textuality. He envisions texts as fields of signification that readers enter, empowering them to either enforce the closure of meaning or engage in the 'play' of signifiers, resulting in the dissemination and disruption of meanings (Leitch 1318). Literary works from the high modernist and postmodernist traditions, enriched with intertextuality and diverse denominations, particularly facilitate the latter mode of reading