IN 1968, ROLAND BARTHES pronounced “the death of the author.” David Foster Wallace distilled the French literary theorist’s rather screwy point a quarter-century later: “It is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means.” Perhaps the “author” (the “entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning”) was “dead” in some postmodern sense; but the “writer” (the “person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features”) remained very much alive. Whatever “the death of the author” might mean, “one thing which it cannot mean,” Wallace assured us, quoting the novelist William Gass, “is that no one did it.”
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