A running theme of the essay, especially prominent in sections two, six, and seven, is that the literary criticism of Barthes’s day was a sham. For Barthes, the critic-emperor has no clothes. He regards literary criticism as an industry that disingenuously elevates the author and the author’s biography to profit from its own authority and prestige by supplying a steady stream of final (but bogus) interpretations of texts. Barthes’s disdain for the practice of critics who interpret texts by what is outside of them is palpable whenever he refers to them.

For example, Barthes downgrades critics who claim to discover the meaning of a text in its author’s biography: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (143). Later, Barthes writes, “when the author has been found, the text is ‘explained’” (147). Barthes puts references to explanation in quotes and italics to belittle the literary criticism of his day, which was called explication de texte (“text explanation”). Explication de texte involved minutely close reading paired with tracing out every single cultural and biographical element that could possibly contribute the text’s meaning. It was essentially the official approach scholars had to subscribe to if they were to rise in the French academic ranks.