The missing ingredient in Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes attempts to shift the responsibility for the construction of meaning within literary works from the author to the reader herself. This should be rather clear from the title of the piece, and it’s justified by his elegant contention, “The true locus of writing is reading” (5). This is because of the reader’s need to synthesize the various cultural spaces and contexts in which the given texts are based, as well as the prerogative of the reader to unify the “multiplicity” of the given texts (6). Such an argument makes clear that the meaning of a piece comes from those who soak it in. It’s not just inherent in the piece itself, as something toward which every reader may strive; it’s in the actual reading itself.

Adherence to virtue within the bourgeoisie of “The Christmas Tree and a Wedding”

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx makes clear a particular argument regarding the status of the bourgeoisie: “The modern bourgeois society” has further stratified social classes in the contemporary world (34), and it must continue to modernize “the instruments of production,” so as to maintain control over the rest of the world—namely, the proletariat, the working people (38). This contention places at its core the reality of modern production, and advancements in industry. However, even at its core, the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is rather simple. Whereas the proletariat creates capital, in the process of production, it is composed of wage-labourers, whom the bourgeoisie, their bosses, pay the bare minimum to survive and remain at their job (54-5). Thus, the bourgeoisie class maintains its power from the capital produced by those subservient to them (55).