[This was brought forth by, but isn't really a response to, the very perceptive article "The Death of the Editor" by J. Stephen Murphy.] My own feeling is that the New Criticism, reader-response theory, and deconstruction were each responding to something that is just true: that is, the fact that, whatever it is that creates a text's meaning, the author's intention just isn't it. In our experience of reading, authorial intention is a complete non-event except in unusual moments -- as when we become positively stymied ("What can the author mean?"). (Now the reasons why deconstruction arrived at this conclusion seem to me quite unnecessary -- we don't need structuralism's semiotics OR deconstruction's counter-revolution to see that authorial intention is always imputed, never actual, even when it is the author who imputes it to the author.) The author's intention is, in all cases, properly phrased as "the intention someone impute...