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. In a well-known passage, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a 'text is a tissue of quotations,' drawn from 'innumerable centers of culture,' rather than from one, individual experience. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. Readers must thus, according to Barthes, separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach's discussion of narrative tyranny in biblical parables). For Barthes, however, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: 'To give a text an author' and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it 'is to impose a limit on that text.' In this type of criticism against which he argues, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive 'explanation' of the text. In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of an author's identity to distill meaning from the author's work. The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his 'From Work to Text'. 5–6 in 1967 the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no.

The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no.

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. Barthes's 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.

' The Death of the Author' ( French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980).

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