I’m doing an analysis on Authors of literature for one of my majors at university and I found this really interesting quote in one of the texts I’m reading. It talks about the theory “Death of the Author”. This theory basically states that the author is absent from the text and it is our own judgement and observation that shapes the meaning of a novel or piece of literature. So often when I’m reading I often fall in love with the author and feel as if they understand me, or that him and I are on the same level of thinking. So it’s really interesting to think that perhaps what I believe the author to be saying is infact not his or hers intentions. 

“Even if we were to go to a living author and ask what he or she meant by a particular text, all we would get would be another text (his or her answer), which would then, in turn, be open to interpretation. Just because it comes ‘from the horse’s mouth’ does not mean that the horse it telling the truth, or that the horse knows the truth, or indeed that what the horse has to say about the ‘words on the page’ is necessarily more interesting or illuminating than what anyone else might have to say. As anyone who has read an ‘interview with the author’ will know, the words you get from the horse’s mouth often tell us more about the horse than about the text we’re trying to read”