Taken from the title of an essay by Barthes, Roland, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968), translated as ‘The Death of the Author’ (1977), this phrase is widely regarded in academia and the media as emblematic of both post-structuralism and postmodernism in that its purpose is to signal the absolute relativity of the text and the correspondingly enhanced status of the critic. Put simply, Barthes’s basic point is that the author’s life (the intricate details of their biography, in other words) is not part of the literary object. Although Barthes makes no mention of it, his argument echoes and extends the work of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley who, in two famous essays ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1946) (both appear in revised form in Wimsatt’s Verbal Icon (1954), argued that neither our knowledge about an author nor the particular affect a piece has on its readers are valid grounds for judging the quality of the text. Barthes’s point differs in that, in contrast to these two forerunners of New Criticism, he is not interested in judging the relative merits of certain literary objects, but is rather trying to unravel the specific ontology of the literary object. His argument has three strands to it, each one reflecting the influence of ideas that were in circulation at the time of writing, though not yet synthesized as they are here: first, when an author creates a character and gives that character a voice the author ceases to be the one who is speaking (this point echoes Bakhtin, Mikhail’s notion of dialogism); second, all writing is simply words on a page, so it is language itself that speaks not an author (this is a fundamental premise of structuralism); third, all writing is quotation (this point echoes Kristeva, Julia’s notion of intertextuality). See also readerly and writerly; work and text.