The Most Overrated Article of All Time?

When reading works of literature, we shouldn’t reduce them to mere offshoots of their producers’ biography. That’s absolutely true, but there are better and worse ways of making this point, and—in spite of Roland Barthes’ general brilliance—the arguments in “The Death of the Author” are among the worst. How did this article, replete as it is with elementary logical errors, become so firmly entrenched in the canon of literary theory?