Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Death of the Author"
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture…the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.
Props to linguistics for teaching us that stories and poems are so much more than works of art made by individual people. Seriously, it's crazy how many layers of writing and discourse go into any one text! The idea of the single "author" is over. Finito. Passé. Texts are basically just antennae: writers are transmitting all of the countless bits of information that pass through them day by day. Sure, they can try to choose what frequencies they're tuning in to, but that's about all they've got.
Barthes published this essay not long after being taken to task by another scholar, Raymond Picard, who straight up called Barthes a fraud. In 1963, Barthes had published a book of essays on Jean Racine, and instead of explaining stuff about Racine's life and culture and how it related to his works, Barthes had focused on the textual elements of Racine's work rather than the author's life and culture—in fact, he slapped on a close reading that both New Critics and structuralists would be proud of.
Barthes's insistence on reading the work without inferring anything about it from the author's life annoyed Picard, but that didn't stop Barthes. Anything but! Over the years, he moved further and further away from caring about "authors," and spent more and more time focusing on how writers and readers and broader cultural discourses all contribute to the making of texts. Inspired yet?