So the author has died.

In Barthes "The Death of the Author" I found many passages that powerfully illustrated his point that the author is a much smaller source of meaning in the text than we previously believed. The emphasis he puts on the reader as being the one who sees the writing as a crossroad of multiple writings coming from various points such as the author, the culture of that author, the culture of the reader, and the dominant culture of the times. Barthes says it very well in this passage:

"[The meaning]...[is] a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

From this I got the notion that the author is no more in control of the text than his predecessors or the reader, or anyone for that matter. I like that Barthes brings up the fact that it is impossible for an author to be original in his writing because the dictionary of words from which he draws his work from is constructed and available before he begins to write. This also makes me think of how the writing and the author exist together and one doesn't produce the other. The writing of the text is a temporal experience in both the existences of the author and the text itself.
When Barthes discusses how giving the text an author is to impose a limit on the text he suggests that the text has much more meaning outside of what the author had thought or intended and by limiting it to his specific meaning would be to hold it back from achieving its fullest potential. That is why the reader is truly in power and can read the text for what it can really be regardless of the intentions of the author.