Joseph Conrad and the Reader: Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership

In part one, "Theoretical Perspectives," Acheraïou provides a summary of Barthes's theory of the death of the author and demonstrates that Conrad did not share Barthes's notions about the relationships among the author, reader, and text: "where Barthes dismisses the writer as a total absence, Conrad grants that novelist a real, though unstable footing in his writing" (19).