Is the Author Really Dead?

For this posting, I am going to focus on Barthes with particular focus on his declaration of "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end…the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding in us.'" Barthes states that a text is separate from the author, deriding academia's focus on the author's life and time period they are in. As an undergraduate student in literature, this was how we were taught to disseminate texts, with a focus on the 'text itself.' That's all well and good (and incredibly simplified, I know) but what happens in the case of the 'death of the author' when they are writing about themselves. In particular, the genre of the memoir and biography? Some authors have made entire careers based on writing about their lives (see David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Michelle Tea), forming their anecdotes in short stories or collections of thematic vignettes. Other others write about a significant time period in their lives, such as a turbulent adolescence or memorable event. What comes to mind is Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which is sold fiction, but is based on Kerouac's true life experiences. Is there a death of the author, Jack Kerouac, and a birth of a character "Kerouac" in the alter-ego of "Sal"? Does On the Road fit in with other texts that are largely autobiographical but not one hundred percent accurate, such as Audre Lorde's Zami? I'm confused as to where the author stops and the text begins in cases such as these.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I hope that we can discuss it tomorrow in class.