Abstract
While Roland Barthes' notion of the death of the author, illustrated in his famous homonymous work, is widely known, there remains much to be explored regarding his return to the authorial figure in the concept of “biographeme”. This concept appears briefly and enigmatically in his text Sade, Fourier, Loyolaitalic>. The following article resumes Barthes' notion of the biographeme, taking as model the lessons from his seminars “10 Years of Semiology” (unpublished) and “Le lexique de l'auteur” (notes posthumously published in 2010). Biographeme will hereby be understood as a “significant feature”, which is contradictory, plural, and also as a footprint left by the author in the subjectivity of the readers, particularly alluding to bodily and affective features. This concept will be linked to current conceptualizations on authorship and the need to transcend the romantic paradigm of the individual, singular author, in order to conceive the notion of authorship as a form of community. The theoretical reflection will then be applied to the interpretation of two recent Latin American narrative texts: Mi abuela: Marta Rivas Gonzálezitalic>, by the Chilean Rafael Gumucio (2013) and A resistênciaitalic> (2015), by the Brasilean-Argentinian Julián Fuks. In both these autofictional works biography and autobiography will be seen to oscillate, thus revealing the occurrence of the biographeme
Keywords
biographeme; author; community; biography; Rafael Gumucio; Julián Fuks