Death of the author, 2009

Death of the author reveals the process of headline writing and the part the reader plays in constructing the story from the truncated sentences. The ‘headlines’ used in this publication are generated from the alphabetical list of the most emotionally charged words used in the headlines from the Hackney Gazette over the past two years.



We are so used to reading the verbal shorthand of newspapers we don’t question the sentence construction, but fill in the blanks and generate our own meaning for the ‘Critical Drama Frenzy’. Through the act of reading the words move from a more passive, arbitrary, alphabetical context, to an active one, reacting with each other and generating a narrative informed by the reader’s own cultural experience.



It is therefore the reader that ‘writes’ this text. As Barthes (1977:142) says ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination’. The ‘birth of the reader’ is always at ‘the cost of the death of the author’.