Thanks for your very full and helpful response to my cry for help. It
certainly is important to have a sense of the history of such a complex
issue.
Obviously it's necessary for the author to be alive and motivated with
intentions to represent/communicate/engage-in-ritual-activity in order to
bring the text into existence, but thereafter - as far as the reader is
concerned - s/he might as well be "dead".
But this writer is still alive :-)
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.