Roland Barthes' 'death of the author' thesis, grounded in structuralist semiotics, holds that a text's meaning is produced in reading, not deposited by authorial intention or lived experience.

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Authorial intention(as used in literary theory and philosophy of language): What the author meant to communicate or express when they wrote something, including their purpose, goals, and the meanings they wanted readers to take away.
Death of the author(as Barthes' main thesis): The idea that once a writer publishes something, what it means is no longer controlled by what the writer intended—readers create the meaning themselves.
Roland Barthes(as a key thinker who challenged the idea that an artist's intent matters most): A famous French philosopher and critic (1915–1980) who argued that once an author publishes their work, their personal intentions shouldn't control how readers interpret it.
Semiotics(Term created by Peirce; defined via de Lauretis 1984, 167): The process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meanings to signs; a theory of how meaning is created through processes of interpretation
Structuralist semiotics(as the theoretical foundation for Barthes' argument): An approach that studies how signs and symbols work together in systems to create meaning, rather than assuming meanings are obvious or natural.
text(Gold's language learning model): An endless and ultimately exhaustive sequence of presented expressions from some target language

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