ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes famously announced the passing away of the literary author. What was lost was the sense of an identifiable Agent, an origin (an original) — the One who had infused sense into a work, creating meanings and unity. Critics used to have “the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’. . . . ”6 Barthes refers to this task of peering into the depths of a text’s meaning to search for the Author as an effort of “decipherment.” The aim was to trace
back along the causal chain from the surface of a text to its hidden point-source.
