What Barthes means by 'the death of the author' — the reader, not the author, creates meaning

What the Epic of Gilgamesh confronts — mortality, and the realization that the quest for immortality is futile

Epic of Gilgamesh explores mortality's inevitability and immortality's unattainability

What Celan's 'Death Fugue' does — writes about the Holocaust in the language of the perpetrators

'Death Fugue' by Paul Celan articulates Holocaust horror in perpetrator's linguistic framework

What the New Critics argued — the poem is an autonomous object, ignore the author's biography and intentions

New Critics emphasized the poem's self-contained meaning, disregarding authorial context

What Borges' Pierre Menard does — rewrites Don Quixote word for word, but it means something entirely different

Borges' Pierre Menard rewrites Don Quixote, creating a new interpretation

What Goethe's Faust Part One explores — the tragedy of desire for knowledge and experience at any cost

Faust Part One: Tragic pursuit of boundless knowledge and experience

What Nabokov's Lolita forces the reader to confront — seductive prose in the service of a monster's self-justification

Lolita's narrative compels readers to grapple with the moral ambiguity of aestheticized immorality