# Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025 Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025.md Podcast: [New Books in Literary Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453) Published: 2026-08-12T08:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9884176331.mp3 Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK9884176331.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/episodes/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025 Duration seconds: 3084 ## Resource The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/episodes/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies-1048453/michael-r-griffiths-the-death-of-the-author-and-anticolonial-thought-palgrave-macmillan-2025.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.