Killing Joke: Authorship from Barthes to Nothomb

In this article, I discuss the ongoing legacy of Barthes’s 1967 essay “La mort de l’auteur” by putting it in dialogue with the fiction of the bestselling Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb and the biographical criticism of Nothomb’s French-language critics. Nothomb promotes a monological, authorist reading of her work that goes fundamentally against the grain of poststructuralist, anti-authorialist theory. However, Nothomb’s sparring with ideas of authorship and of readers’ interpretation in works such as Hygiène de l’assassin articulates an active – though hostile – engagement with the Barthesian idea of the “death of the author,” demonstrating the ongoing relevance of this totemic essay in the era of the “retour au récit.