Citationality and Authorship in Barthes and Borges

Abstract

This essay compares Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) with Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939), examining how Borges’s fiction anticipated but also exceeded later Borgesian theory on influence, authorship, and the reader. It argues that, in addition to anticipating Barthesian notions of citationality, unoriginality, and inverse mimesis in literature, Borges’s tale unpacks the psychological ramifications of influence, as well as imagining the various other ways in which the idea of authorship may be challenged