Abstract
The author was supposed to be dead, but in the age of social media and the rampant commodification of self, has there ever been less of a divide between the author and the text as there is today? Through a close reading of the work of poet Jackson McCarthy, this article returns to Roland Barthes’ famous theory of the ‘death of the author’ to think through the landscape of contemporary poetry in Aotearoa New Zealand. McCarthy’s poetry – in its appeal to the poet as poemmaker, whose identity sits just outside the frame of the text – offers a potential turning point in Aotearoa New Zealand literature away from the personal politics of the author, and the author-as-brand more generally, towards the reader and the text itself. In this sense, McCarthy’s poetics, and the Barthesian moment it revives, is something of an antidote to scupper or dilute the overarching cultural drivers of our time.