Citations after the death of the author

Julius, Chloë

Abstract

This essay uses the publication of Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to consider the changed status of citations in art made during and after the 1960s. Setting the scene for the ensuing essays, Julius argues that each of the instances of citation explored by the contributing authors variously belong to an intellectual landscape shaped by the questions Barthes posed in this essay, questions that the American art critic Craig Owens claimed that ‘the art frequently referred to as ‘postmodernist’, can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to.’ Owens’s name recurs throughout the collection; his writings toward a theory of postmodernism from the late 1970s and 1980s help draw out the art-historical implications of Barthes’ essay. Although Owens’s vision for art after ‘The Death of the Author’ never came to pass, his art criticism reveals the context in which citations erupted into the expanded field of post-1960s art.

• Acceptance Date: Feb 15, 2024
• Deposit Date: Mar 5, 2024
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Book Title: Cases of Citation: On Literature in Art
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/32168044