Study Task 2: death of the Author

So a pretty dense and difficult text, but Ill try my best. In summary, the text questions authorship, the relevance of the author when comparing the person to the work at hand. He argues that ones writing is inherently too personal to take at face value for a reader, because of this text's are limited. Trying to understand the author to see past this can also be detrimental, as Barthes argues that it is easy to mix the authors history after the writings creation. Because of this, the language and content of the writing is the most important element, it is the face value of the work. With this, Barthes comes to the conclusion that the reader them self holds more responsibility than the author to the text, their job to find information about the place the work came from, to appropriately research. To summarise this, Barthes writes "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author" 

A very interesting text, its quite refreshing to be told that other texts aren't always correct, to always question them. Theres an important lesson here, to take responsibility in my research and make sure my output is airtight. I did, ironically considering the message of the text, find Barthes came across a tad too sure of himself, making it somewhat difficult to want to really take in the text.