Barthes: The Bridge between Formalism and Reader-Response?

Sorry my post is so late this week.

Upon reading Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author," it seems like Barthes is sort of a bridge between Formalism and reader-response theory. He describes writing as "the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" (1322). He is wary of the author, on which criticism centers: "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing" (1325). Barthes argues that the language speaks for itself; it has no origin. This seems very closely related to "The Intentional Fallacy" as delineated by Wimsatt and Beardsley, who argue that critics should not debate about or try to find the author's intention and should instead look at the form of a work for meaning. With the death of the author that Barthes proposes, the reader is born: "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" (1326). The prominence of the reader, however, is not part of Formalism, but rather, reader-response theory. Thus, Barthes' theory seems to form a bridge between the two approaches to a text. Like Wolfgang Iser in "Interaction between Text and Reader," Barthes acknowledges the role of the reader while still focusing on the structure of a work.

Indeed, the headnote to Barthes' essays describes him as being in between structuralism and post-structuralism, and this is due to the great diversity of his works. His later works in some ways contradict or reconstruct the ideas posited by his earlier works. For instance, he later writes that the author exists, but not as "an extratextual identity determining meaning;" instead, the author is a text that can be read (1318). In addition, in another work Camera Lucida, Barthes contradicts his arguments about photography that he presented in Mythologies. In the earlier work, he described how photographs reveal a reality that is contrived, whereas in the later work, he writes that a photograph can tell us "This has been" (1319). I bring these two ideas up because they show the contradictions inherent in Barthes' work and also because these are two subjects that I find interesting, having studied the body as text and the role of photographs in the poetry of Natasha Trethewey.

With regard to Frankenstein, I guess I would then ask, what is the structure from which it is created? Barthes writes that "The text is a tissue of quoataion drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" (1324), and that "the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (1325). What are the cultural signifiers that make up Frankenstein? What does the language (especially since we have three narrators) tell the reader?