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Was Killing the Queer Author Necessary to Liberate the Queer Text?: The Case of Andy Warhol's A: A Novel

In the decades since Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” (1968), Michel Foucault's “What Is an Author?” (1969), and Andy Warhol's novel A (1968), we have become comfortable with the idea that the author is separate from the text. In many ways, however, killing the author was an unnecessary act since critics inherently read their own ideas into texts. Within the span of less than two years, all three texts proposed the removal of the author from the text, all three by prominent gay men in academia and art. The act of removing the author represented a kind of closet protection, separating artist from art, author from text. This aricle examines the convergence of ideas of Barthes and Foucault and how they relate to Warhol's A. In these writers and texts, we see a sexuality eager to burst forth from the page, but one that is hesitant, worried that the sexual politics of the late 1960s are not so liberated as to freely accept homosexuality among the artistic and academic elite. This is the real tragedy in the death of the author, when the identity and spirit of the artist/writer is so denied by the audience that not only is the sexuality lost, but the artist as well.