ABSTRACT

While it is common and traditional to treat the author as the origin of meaning, literary and cultural scholars have questioned the stability and structure of meaning presumed by privileging the author, instead declaring texts to be inherently meaningless except in the context of communities of readers in particular situations, rendering audiences to be active agents in the construction of meaning. Barthes offered a liberating challenge to author privilege, proclaiming a text to be “not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” to be unified, made meaningful, by the reader (1977: 146).