What is an author?

> Literary criticism, after all, is not some nebulous cloud of musings and opinion.

It is precisely that. Always has been, always will be, because critics are of a fundamentally different kind than the authors whose work they analyze. On rare and wonderful occasions they can produce an insightful and amusing cloud of musings and opinion, but far more often it is a pretentious and turgid one.

Can you imagine a non-physician setting out to critically analyze the work of a surgeon? A non-scientist setting out to critically analyze the work of a physicist? We don't have to imagine the latter: they are called philosophers of science, and from Popper to Cartwright they are all too often almost terminally embarrassing to the people whose work they talk about.

When critics proclaim "the death of the author" they aren't saying authors don't exist and don't have intentions, they are saying "You are dead to me!" They are disowning the author in an angry snit, because authors so routinely disappoint their expectations. It would be rather sad if it wasn't so farcically funny.

Social media are allowing those declared dead to inconveniently crash the critics' party, and this is a good thing. It is very difficult to continue to proclaim that the intentions of the maker of an artifact don't matter when they come along and explain their design choices to you, in public, on-the-record, for all the world to see.