The Death of the Author
gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it
is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypo-
critically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been
the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one
who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by
which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers
or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the
birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
— translated by Richard Howard
6
annaabi.ee 
