One of the greatest literary debates is whether or not the author is dead. The argument centers around the idea that a writer’s intentions for their work is meaningless (or dead) in comparison to a reader’s interpretation of it. Since Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” — in which Barthes argued, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text” — the question of how attached a creator should be to their work has been raised. Should an author’s intentions and biases matter when deconstructing a work?

The answer is yes, but no.

The wonderful thing about art is that the impact lies in how the audience connects to it. Every individual experiences art through their own lens, and books are no exception. However, this can lead us to take what an author wrote to mean what we want to hear. Many works have very specific messages or meanings — ones that are lost when a work is taken out of context.

A prevalent example of this is “Lolita” by Vladimer Nabokov: a crime thriller about the dangers of pedophiles that has been widely accepted as a romance novel. Many people view the age gap between the two main characters as a romantic taboo and not as a heinous crime. Nobrakov’s flowery writing is often used for aesthetics, while the violent meaning behind it is voided. Vanity Fair even called it “the only convincing love story of our century.”

Twisting a text in that way can be dangerous, but it is an extreme. There are other books that offer space for outside interpretation, but can still be misconstrued. Chuck Palahniuk has been welcoming certain takes on “Fight Club,” such as interpreting the characters as queer, but has adamantly blasted others that paint the characters as role models. For some others, we can only infer what an author may have been trying to say. There’s no concrete evidence of what William Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” about, so it’s up to the audience to guess. Then there’s books like George Orwell’s “1984,” and no one can seem to agree on that novel’s message.

So maybe it’s not a question of if the author’s intent matters. It’s a question of how much.

Dr. Jenée Wilde, a senior instructor of English who focuses on science fiction, works with this question quite a bit — specifically as it relates to queer studies. Reading through a queer lens requires an understanding of how a reader’s interpretation may depart from an author’s original intention, specifically when it comes to literature that wasn’t initially written to be queer.

“It’s particularly relevant in older literature where there wasn’t a lot of representation of queer people and queer life, and ideas of that were very much coded,” Wilde said. “So you would have to bring a different lens to read it against the grain of the normative understanding.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean that normative understanding is wrong, or that the queer reading is overlooking context. It simply means looking through different lenses can help to pick up on different clues. Wilde continued, “I think both readings are valid, and all that’s really required is that you provide enough reasoning and evidence textually to back up the reading.”

Then there’s the issue of a certain creator or work being problematic — for example, if it comes out that an author has made racist remarks or a reader realizes that a favorite piece of literature contains less than favorable depictions of women, an author can become problematic and criticized in the public eye. With situations like this, the lines between author’s intent and reader interpretation can become even more blurred. We may want to hold on to a certain piece of art, but we don’t want to be affiliated with the artist. The issue here is that someone’s artistic work is an extension of themselves; their biases and experiences are ingrained into their creation. So, even when we might have our own personal interpretations of these works, our meanings are still derived from this person’s views — problematic or not.

However, it is possible to have a personal relationship with a work and what it’s saying while being critical of it — just as it is possible to read something differently than it was intended without losing the intended and original meaning of the piece of writing.

“It actually shows more maturity of an individual and their critical thinking skills when they’re able to keep sympathetic and critical readings of a text intention with each other and not be too much the fangirl on one side or the hypercritical activist on the other side,” Wilde said. They explained either direction inevitably loses something; the fangirl loses critical thinking, and the hypercritical activist loses the art. The key to avoiding this is to approach works with nuance.

So the author is undead. Their intentions shouldn’t be removed from their work, but their literature shouldn’t be limited to only their experiences. There’s room to read books differently than intended without twisting the messages just as there’s space to be critical and understanding. It’s all about how a reader’s lens melds with an author’s.

“That’s the communication; it’s not a one way process,” Wilde said. “We bring ourselves to the art as much as it brings it’s meaning to us.”