One of the few ideas in literary theory that made its way across the chasm that separates me from it is the notion of the 'death of the author'. By analogy with the original idea, with no more than a cursory link to the Wikipedia entry and disregarding Barthes and subsequent scholarship as irrelevant, I will take this to refer to the observation that whatever the intentions of the author in writing a text, the effective meaning and substance of it is in how it presents itself to the mass of readers.