Literary theory has gone beyond the idea of reading text through the lens of Lacanian, Freudian, Feminist, or Marxist theory, and on to questioning the idea of how literature should be read. Roland Barthes, a prominent French literary critic, declared in his essay "The Death of the Author" that "Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature." In essays such as Barthes' which began to crop up in the 1970s, theorists question whether, for those who read for pleasure or otherwise, there should be certain demands on the reader in order to help them understand the "absolute" truth of a piece of writing as it was specifically desired by the author. However, the painful truth is that despite whatever hopes the writer initially held, no reader will understand the story in the exact fashion that they desire. The understanding of the role of the writer has changed as more and more critics have accepted this fact, and as discussions therefore shift from "I think He/She intended" to "For me this piece means." The role of the reader has quickly become the next inevitable issue. For me, as a writer, and as one who understands that I can never appropriately write in a such a way as to convince my reader of my exact intentions, I simply approach a piece with whatever personal intelligence I have. The object of reading is to take nothing more than yourself and your knowledge to the text—just as the writer has done. The "you" includes the previous information surrounding the text, whether you have gone and searched for it or not. If you decide to accumulate more knowledge in order to understand a piece of literature is up to the reader him/herself.

               The writer's role now is to create a piece that will interest and hopefully change the reader by providing them with some sort of "truth" or knowledge. The way in which writers are inspired to write is from the knowledge they carry with them and what shapes them. Barthes sums this idea quite nicely: "text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." I interpret this as saying that writers' inspirations are drawn from what creates the writer as a person—be it culture, upbringing, race—just as these catalysts form other human beings and inspire them in certain ways. Ignoring this universal truth, and giving the author's assorted "centers of culture" an ultimate authority above all others who read his/her work provides an unfair bias towards the writer. To Barthes, "[giving] a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified." What room is left for interpretation if only one authority (the writer) can confirm or reject it? Would that assumption not make every piece of literary theory and literature moot—especially considering those writers who are dead and gone, beyond reachability? Reed Way Dasenbrock, a literary theorist and former pupil of Stanley Fish, in his essay "Do We Write the Text We Read?" states, "As we can never know Milton's own sense of his own words, all we can know is our own." Despite Dasenbrock's flagrant absolutes, he has a good point. Milton is a mind lucky enough to have his thoughts live on past his own lifetime, but the messages associated with those thoughts change over time as its readers change.

               Though authors often portray universal tales (such as those of true love or conspiracy), many times the ideals of the time they were written have dated. Theorists often take those dated sentiments and subject them to theories as they develop. Shakespeare's The Tempest could easily be interpreted with the theory of traditional symbols as the beautiful idea of Prospero using an airy sprite (Ariel) along with the earthy organic Caliban to create his final masterpiece of a storm and marry his daughter off to a wealthy man. Now, with the prominent and often thick lenses of Feminist and Marxist theory, Prospero's oppression over Caliban, (a "native" of an island and hideous in appearance) has more of what interests those who read The Tempest. Yet Dasenbrock approaches this issue in a simple and appropriate way in his essay, stating, "Because the text changes as the world changes, the text we read/write is the only one we have."  Shakespeare's work's meaning has changed since its conception because issues such as oppression of minorities/aboriginals has become a major focus of contemporary society. The fact that Shakespeare in no way intended for The Tempest to tell of Prospero's abuse towards Caliban is unimportant—especially to those who read specifically through current literary theory, to whom the fact his theme of oppression was inadvertent makes it all the more significant.

               Readers interpret with biases. Just as writers create through certain influences, we too read with influences. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton, a man who has studied everything from Marxism to theology, writes in his book Literary Theory: An Introduction, "readers do not of course encounter texts in a void: all readers are socially and historically positioned"; and more importantly, adds, "how [readers] interpret literary works will be deeply shaped by this fact" (p. 72). Once a piece of writing is in the hands of someone other than the writer, a message—even one beyond the control of the author him/herself—has the power; that which the reader garners from the text. Eagleton writes about the impossibility of absolute and pure reading, focusing on the power of one word over how one reads as we each have our own attached impressions to even words separate from whole texts: "If I cannot read the word 'nightingale' without imagining…the solace of Nature, then the word has a certain power for me, or over me, which does not magically evaporate when I encounter it in a poem" (p. 76). If a single word can sway a reader from one interpretation or another, all pieces of literature are left with a great variety of possible interpretations.

               Although it seems that there are endless alternative meanings one can find in a body of text, somehow most of the fundamental portions remain consistently understood from person to person. Dasenbrook recognizes the idea that we rarely construe these facts to the point of estranging readers from one another: "No plausible case can be made…for the argument that our interpretations are so far apart that they are interpretations of different objects or texts altogether." The differences that do occur tend to be slight, and lie not in the works themselves (as writers may have intended or suffered from their own ambiguities), but in the minds that read them. Even if "where one person sees a sun or moon 'in trouble,' another sees an eclipse" (Dasenbrook), the important fact is not whether or not one considers the sun or moon as "in trouble," but the recognition of the actual obscuring of the light source. So if we go so far as to accept the idea of the reader's right to interpretation, the issue of whether the reader will actually take anything from the text becomes a concern. With all this information, the assumption would be that reading will become a self-serving ritual in which readers only read in order to reaffirm the ideals already in place, rather than discover revealing and life-changing messages. Yet as time has shown, readers still manage to learn something from literature. Dasenbrock describes the implausibility of such a reality, "if interpretations are always self-confirming, we [cannot] learn anything from any act of interpretation, except to learn once more that the shoe fits." In other words, if all literature only performed the function Dasenbrock describes, only a small fraction of those who read today would in fact be reading. Reading would be one of the dullest pastimes, and definitely would not have survived for as many years as it has. On the contrary, as Eagleton says, "as we read on we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make more and more complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens up a horizon which is confirmed, challenged or undermined by the next" (p. 72). Texts challenge us despite whatever biases we carry—the effectiveness of powerful prose bears no infringement. But what Eagleton was describing more than an idea proving readers' interest in reading, but, more importantly, theory about the worth and process of reading itself.

               The process that Eagleton dubs the "hermeneutical circle" (p. 64) is complex and intricate, but to me most accurately describes the discourse between the reader's mind and the text they are reading. The fact that he considers it an ongoing exchange compared to the majority's beliefs that literature is one-sided, (be it the reader or the writer) marks Eagleton's theory as exceedingly important in terms of literary theory. The first portion of the theory states that, "the reader will bring to the work certain 'pre-understandings', a dim context of beliefs and expectations within which the work's various features will be assessed" (p. 67). Just as I had stated earlier, each reader should be asked to bring nothing more than their mental faculties and personal knowledge and still be able to take something from the text. Yet in order to do that, by Eagleton's set of beliefs, a sub-portion of the hermeneutical circle entitled "reception theory" must take place: the reader draws from part work in its fragments and do his/her best to construct connections and speculations about the text, then return to the text as a whole and again be forced to draw conclusions—all of which are decisions that must be made before the reader has finished the entire piece of literature (p. 66). It is when these actions become continuous throughout the reading process that the reader is exercising the hermeneutical cycle. After defining reception theory, Eagleton goes on to describe the interaction between reader and text: "As the reading process proceeds, [the reader's] expectations will themselves be modified by what [they] learn, and the hermeneutical circle – moving from part to whole and back to part – will begin to revolve" (p. 67). Eagleton's hermeneutical circle provides a sound analysis of why reading not only holds attention, but also demands so much of us as readers. We are forced, (at least if one is an active reader) to constantly draw from our knowledge in order to try to discover whatever story or truth the writer has left for us on the page, thus commanding a great deal of our attention and energy in order to read.

               If we assume for a moment that all these pieces of my argument are factual, it leaves a shaky reality for literature. We cannot truly know a work as the author intended it, and we as readers will consistently read with ingrained biases. Just as Eagleton wrote, there is "a knowledge denied to the…reader who has to make do with his or her inevitably partial construction of the text" (p. 73); in other words, we as readers, with the small knowledge we are allowed, we must construct our own truths. If the words affect, their power shows in that way. Empson in his book Argufying, uses the example of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": "Eliot could shake the literary world by the mere force of the poem before it was tolerably understood" (p. 17). So while I do not completely agree with Barthes when he says "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author," I accept more of Eagleton's philosophy that "for literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author" (p. 65).