Another crucial issue which has arisen through poststructuralism is the (in)famous “death of the author.” The deconstructive emphasis on unintended meanings renders authorship and the author's individual responsibility for the meanings inherent in the written or read text highly problematic. If texts encoded their own terms of understanding and difference, then it did not make sense to study what the author had “intended,” as most twentieth-century literary criticism had quite literally intended to find out. Perhaps, in a structuralist mode, authorship could be seen as simply a “function” within a system of discourse, as Michel Foucault suggested: