Does a text mean what its author meant?

Not necessarily, said Roland Barthes in 1967, and he made the claim as dramatic as possible. His essay "The Death of the Author" argues against the habit of relying on an author's intentions and biography to explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. For Barthes, to give a text an author and a single interpretation is to impose a limit on it. A text is not a message from one person but a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. Its unity lies not in its origins but in its destination, its audience.

He illustrated the problem with a sentence from Balzac's Sarrasine. Is it Balzac professing ideas on femininity? Universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? Barthes's answer: we can never know. The writer is merely a "scriptor", a word chosen to separate "author" from "authority".

The essay set off a long quarrel. Michel Foucault asked in 1969 what an author is, and called the author an ideological figure marking how we fear the proliferation of meaning. Wayne Booth argued that you cannot talk about a text without talking about an author. Seán Burke wrote a whole book against Barthes, pointedly called The Death and Return of the Author.

And Cedric Watts, writing under the pseudonym J.C. Carlier, replied with a satire: those who take Barthes's essay literally fail the test of critical competence, and those who spot the irony pass. A reply about authorship, signed by a name that was not its author's.