Death of the Author

Roland Barthes's 1967 manifesto declaring that the author's biography and intentions are irrelevant to textual interpretation — meaning is produced by the reader in the act of reading, not by the author in the act of writing.

Against the 'Author-God': the traditional critical practice of explaining a text by reference to the author's intentions, biography, or psychology gives the author a theological authority over meaning — a 'secret' that criticism must decode. Barthes's counter-claim: once the text is written, the author is 'dead' — the text is a tissue of quotations from innumerable centers of culture, not a unified expression of a single consciousness. Meaning is not prior to the text but produced in the act of reading. 'The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.' Foundational text of post-structuralist literary theory.