What is an Author? Michel Foucault ( Christina Alex)

What is an Author?

Michel Foucault

Date: 9 January 2014

·         In this essay, Foucault is concerned with the author and the work. It was looked upon as a single entity.

·         The task of criticism is to establish the link between the author and the work.

·         The understanding of language is extended to literary theory through structuralist approaches.

Author	Work/ Text
Signified	Signifier
Unified subject	Language
Reference point

·         Foucault discusses the relationship between writing and the necessity of expression.

·         Traditional/ Classic writers believed in the concept of inspiration: the idea of a muse.

·         Writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth have talked about the compulsion that a writer experiences to put down thoughts into words.

·         An example is The Rime of The Ancient Mariner where the narrator is compelled to tell his tale to a passer-by.

·         This can be regarded as a continuation of the story-telling tradition.

·         Secondly, Foucault talks about the concept of writing and death.

·         A writer lives through his work or in other words, attains immortality with his work.

·         Foucault
suggests
that
his
examples,
that
the
idea
of
perpetuating
or


·         postponing
death
in
the
case
of
the
Greek
epic
and
the
Arabian
tales
 were
metaphosed
by
the
Western
society

·         The idea of the power of the narrator to forestall death through story-telling.

·         This further problematises the notion of the author as an unimportant part of the work.

·         Waiting for Godot is an example of a text where there is no unified meaning in the text and hence it requires us to look for the author in the text.

·         New Critics, Formalists, Structuralists, etc looked for a meaning in the text even after doing away with the concept of the author.

·         These tendencies were prominent in the 20^th century.

·         Writing was removed from expression.

·         Hence, the author disappears and there occurs a removal of the unified subject.

·         Here the question of what happens when you remove a reference point comes up.

·         Writing is a signifying system; meaning is relational and based on difference.

·         It reflects the notion of a simple and self-contained identity; circularity of meaning as opposed to a linear one.

·         Text does not indicate the intention of the author; author expresses through a unified language which reader interprets.

·         This linear trend has changed recently.

·         The author as a transcendental anonymity.

·         The focus shifted to the text/discourse. Foucault states that everything is a discourse.

·         The author still exists, even after having claimed to have disappeared. He is still behind the text because we want a unified meaning from a text.

·         The author's name is not just a name, it is functional as it performs a function.

·         Foucault
points
out
that
the author's
proper
name
equals
a
description. He uses the example of Aristotle to conclude that hearing a particular name leads to associating that name to that person's famous works.

·         The way Foucault describes the author is very restricted/ limited.

Reference:

Lecture by Asst.Prof. Vijayaganesh, Christ University, Bangalore on 9 January 2014.

Foucault, Michel. What is an Author? Print.

Notes prepared by Christina Alex.