Comparative Essay

Introduction

In this essay I intend to compare and contrast following two essays: The Sacred Gaze written by David Morgan and The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. For this purpose I focus on following points that how do the two citations above help to analyze and understand these works and therefore I will articulate two different approaches to the same visual object of study as well as to compare and contrast these two interpretative approaches.

Analysis

In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive explanation of the text (Barthes, 3). For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: To give a text an Author and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it is to impose a limit on that text.

Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables). Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations, drawn from innumerable centers of culture, rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions or tastes of the writer; a text's unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience.

On the other hand the work presented in second book The Sacred Gaze is very important. It offers a useful bridge between art history and religious studies, opening up the insights of each to the other (Barthes, 3). By offering a workable set of analytical categories to be used in studying religious images, Morgan's excellent scholarship promises to advance the current move toward more sophisticated understandings of religious material culture by leaps and bounds. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, author of When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (David, 333).

No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a scriptor (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms author and authority). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate. Every work is eternally written here and now, with each re-reading, because the origin of meaning lies exclusively in language itself and its impressions on the reader (David, 333).

Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature ...