Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text.
Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.
The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies not in its origins", or its creator, "but in its destination", or its audience.
The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and "is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate."
He introduces this notion of intention in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac's story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him.
He also recognized Marcel Proust as being "concerned with the task of inexorably blurring ... the relation between the writer and his characters"; the Surrealist movement for employing the practice of "automatic writing" to express "what the head itself is unaware of"; and the field of linguistics as a discipline for "showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process."
Barthes' work has much in common with the ideas of the "Yale school" of deconstructionist critics, which numbered among its proponents Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson in the 1970s, although they are not inclined to see meaning as the production of the reader.
386–393), J.C. Carlier (a pseudonym of Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English at the University of Sussex) argues that the essay "The Death of the Author" is the litmus test of critical competence.
While specific projects vary, concerns across research construct theoretical frameworks that rely on Barthes' notion of emphasizing the reader's impressions in textual practices.
Other research has drawn on "The Death of the Author" only to subvert its original ideas of disrupting the singularity of author-centered literary criticism and interpretation by suggesting collaborative methods of authorship that enable plural pathways of knowledge.
[8] Although the model articulates an authorial stance, it advances Barthes' ideas of encouraging multiple perspectives, interpretations, and ideological positions through the use of language by rendering authorship a pursuit of collective intelligence that calls into question traditional norms of scholarship.
The first explores having a group of youth with disabilities convey their life-narratives through fictional stories, while the second looks at teacher candidates writing autobiographies with specific attention to their values about teaching.
Previous research projects have emphasized foregrounding students' knowledge in literacy practices, and in this way stress Barthes' central idea of relying on the reader's impressions for literary study.
[8][9] These studies describe writing models in which multiple authors "co-construct" stories and articles together, inviting writers to contribute their own ideas and knowledge and create a product that resembles an assemblage of voices and perspectives.
These studies extend Barthes' initial ideas of how a text contains multiple ideological positions and interpretive possibilities, as well as disputing authorial influence and force, by offering a democratic and pluralistic framework for authorship.