My foray into academia may have been multi-disciplinary but my research interests have been intent on exploring the “Death of the Author” thesis (coined in 1967 by Roland Barthes) and reader-response theories, which critically evaluate the notion of authorial hegemony and identity, intention and presence as they pertain to production and interpretation of the meaning in a literary work.

I wrote my first thesis titled “Deconstructing Authorship and the Production of Meaning in Literature”, which was an evaluation, as the title suggests, of the relationship between the process of writing and the production of meaning understood through the relationship between author/writer and reader. I’ve critically analyzed fictional works that meditate on the process of writing at different stages—from idea recognition and contemplation, to physical scripture and posthumous reception, and for me, the conclusion re-spun the web of authorship claiming its origin not with the author as writer but the author as reader. 

In my second thesis I injected metaphysical philosophy into my approach to text interpretation, uniting hermeneutics with phenomenology in order to conceptualize and re-define the act of authorship as it is built on the foundational processes of writing and reading, or writing as reading: the nature of meaningful expression and the artful interpretation of self and self in the world. This thesis titled, “Literature, Écriture and Life: The Deconstructive Phenomenology of Writing as Reading”, further teases out the relationship between author and reader as one of self and other—a constant and cyclical building up and breaking down of identity that accesses both an internal (self as self) and external (self as other) reality, resulting in a finished literary text that structurally enables the same.