In a history of changing attitudes towards the author, Roland Barthes's essays ‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘From Work to Text’ constitute the most extreme movements away from the author as either arbiter of meaning or source of authority. They also most explicitly emphasise the importance of the reader and of the text. These essays pit author against reader, conceiving the authority of each as mutually exclusive: the open, limitless text can have no author. They also describe modes of reading and qualities of text which strongly resonate with Ulysses. The ways in which Ulysses draws attention to our activity of reading, and the involvement of Joyce in the novel's reception, have made Joyce studies a highly self-reflexive field, and one which variously pre-empted questions explored by literary theorists from the 1960s onwards. Discussing how to read Ulysses became an inescapable aspect of Ulyssean criticism at a very early stage in its reception, and the question of how to read the author is caught up in questions of how to read the text. In part through authorially authorised studies, a key enquiry of early criticism became that of how one should handle the novel's intertextual relationship with the Odyssey. That enquiry has fallen wildly in and out of fashion, and the far-reaching effects of how Ulysses rewrites not only the Odyssey but also scholarly readings of Homer have been missed. These effects create a complex web of authorial and readerly roles, strands of which confirm that explorations of authorship manifest not only in poststructuralist theory and pre-theory Joyce criticism, but in both Homeric scholarship and the Homeric games of Ulysses.

There was, however, a sustained resistance to poststructuralist theory in Joyce studies. Anti-authorialism and the birth of the reader were given little credence and had little impact, and – curiously – several critical studies argued for a return of the author in a discipline which had never quite abandoned the author's authority. In its endless expansion, the discipline continues to advocate a freedom of reading that somehow coexists with an ongoing reliance on authorial authority. This contradiction has arisen in response to the way in which Ulysses makes us read, but it is also pre-figured within that activity of reading. Reading Ulysses puts the reader in an active and creative role, while also highlighting the uncanny talents of its author. In reading Ulysses, however, we create our own authority as readers.