A critical and comparative analysis of P. B. Shelley “A Defence of Poetry” and Roland Barthes “The death of the author” Christina Dymiotis College

Percy Shelley as a Romantic and Ronald Barthes as Post-structuralism have contrasting ideas regarding the function of literature and figure of the author. Despite this, they both view a literary textual object such as a text or a poem as an “excess” but in dissimilar ways. On the one hand, Shelley in his essay “The Defence of Poetry” argues that a poem is an “excess” of pure emotions and pleasure, which are created based on the personal feelings and experiences of the author. Likewise, a poem should be judged based on to what extent the reader can feel all the emotions and delightfulness it contains. In addition, he argues that poetry is a natural source of imagination and pleasure, which includes eternal truths and promotes ideals of a morality. On the other hand, Barthes insists in his essay “The death of the author” that a text is an “excess” of interpretations because a text does not contain one fixed meaning like religious texts. For Barthes, the authors identity of a text should not be evident in their work so the readers can have the opportunity to give a variety of interpretations to a text. In spite of this, he mentions that a text is never viewed as fully original or natural for the reason that it includes a...