The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. Roland Barthes Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author," published in 1967, is an iconic and ground breaking text in literary critical theory in which Barthes argues that the key to understanding a text can be found in the reader. Barthes posits that the author's biography and intentions when writing are far less important than the multiple interpretations that the readers of the text will create. It is readers who matter in the creation of meaning in any given text and not the creator authoring the text. Barthes states this unequivocally in his essay " the author is not the source of meaning; rather, the meaning is produced through the interaction between the text and the reader." This, of course, is a very postmodern notion: there are no absolute truths. Truth and meaning are relative, fluid and changeable. This affects not only the interpretation of an...