The Use Of Plagiarism In Roland Barthes's The Death Of The Author

When Pennycook analyzed the issue of plagiarism in his essay, Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism, he introduced the essence of language learning and the evolution of the notion of author in a detailed way, which provides a different angle to interpret Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author. Barthes describes writing in the beginning of his essay as a “composite, oblique space where our subject slip away” (142). Pennycook can give a lucid explanation of Barthes’s word choice of “composite”, because he believed that, according to Western traditions, literary originality came into being alongside a “wholesale borrowing of language and ideas” (212). Writing, as a part of language learning, needs conducting a

It seems make no sense since it is commonly acknowledged that texts are created and authored by authors. Barthes’s insights on the practical usage of languages as a symbol can provide an interpretation for this philosophical reverse. When we use words to express our thoughts, in reality, we translate the inner thoughts to others by commonly-used words, which was called “a ready-formed dictionary” by Bathes. Based on the standpoint that our thoughts can only become understandable by being translated into existed words, he continued to use Quincey’s example to demonstrate the function of language as a mediation (Barthes 146). In order to translate more ideas and images into language, Quincey, who was expert in Greek, created “an unfailing dictionary” for himself, which contained more “extensive and complex” terms than daily-used languages (146). The case of Quincey’s broad dictionary reminds me of another extreme example which is contrary to his case but can reveal a same viewpoint. George Orwell created a tyrannical society where people have few freedoms of thought in his classical novel 1984. One of the reasons for people’s limited freedom of thought lies in the

Barthes followed Proust’s ideology and pointed out that author “made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model” (144). It seems absurd when Barthes proposed that historical person was just a fragment deprived from a frictional figure (144). Accordingly, by discussing “doing language” in his essay, Pennycook pointed out a similar relationship between language and reality that “it is language that shapes reality and not reality that shapes language” (222). As Pennycook mentioned, “the issue is not one of understanding of the world and then mapping language onto it but rather of acquiring language as texts as a precursor to mapping out textual realities” (222). He continued to argue that these speculations depended on how language and text may be understood (Pennycook 222). Bathes proposed a perspective centering on readers (148). Readers, who are considered as someone “without history, biography, psychology” by him, can take in all the quotations that compose a writing. From a reader’s perspective to analyze the viewpoint of language shaping reality, all the information that readers can get are from the language, either the narration of frictional figure or the historical person’s autobiography. Without any background knowledge of what they are reading, readers cannot distinguish whether this