Barthes says, " 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." What he is saying (or what I believe he is saying) is that by asserting an author, the biases or experiences of an author serve as the definitive explanation of meaning within the text.
I read a quick post from a blog on wordpress (here) that briefly describes his take on Barthes' theories. In it he says, "in literature, even though the writer is the origin of the words on the page, the voice it could be could be anyone’s." This got me thinking about the pseudonyms we picked for our blogs. A pseudonym allows a blog to be personal because it can be anybody. It can be you. It is void of the author's context and allows the reader to be unbiased. With an author, the reader can, even unconciously, think about an author's life or previous works which may lead the reader to preconceived meanings associated with the author.
Barthes is, however, (although he does not think who is speaking matters within a text) still concerned with where the power in the text is coming from. He wants to explore the author's relation to the text without an unequivocal appeal to them as authority of meaning.
With that being said, I kind of think of Barthes' idea of an author as a ghost writer. A ghost writer's text has an author, yet his anonymity can create unbiased readings. I hope Barthes can sleep at night with all those ghost hanging around.
Love,
Juliana
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