Personally, I've long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.

The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author's intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.

As Roland Barthes put it, "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It's only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of "an indictment of Roland Barthes" from "oogabooga."

A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge "the text itself" divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn't need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize "hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!" When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, "Hey, I can interpret "The Faerie Queene" as a narrative of the history of Communism!" information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.

There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we're interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn't in the text, it's in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you're independent of the author's context, you're only getting out of it what you put in yourself.