The text rather kills the author. In order to know the author, we will have to understand the singularity of his absence and his link to death. The absence of the author leads to the genuine possibility of change.
On the other hand, if we come to know that The Tempest was not written by Shakespeare, it will definitely have an impact on our views regarding Shakespeare.
If we limit over remarks only to book which have authors we can isolate four different features of the author. You may refer to this site to read further. Jerome and his role: He is important not just because he translated the Bible to Latin, but because he throws a light on how texts transform demography of the people and what a particular text does to a civilisation.
Jerome translated Bible to Latin. Similarly, Martin Luther King said that an interpreter is not required and that people need self-interpretation. Religious descent begins the rise of languages.
The role of a translator is also functional. Link to Foucault's essay: While we discuss what is an author and our changing relationship with text, we look at the shift in views over a period of time and how these texts economic, political, religious texts shape our society.
Two types of positions of an author:. Transdiscursive position — Foucault says that even within the realm of a discourse, "a person can be the author of not only a book, but of a theory, tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate" Such authors occupy a transdiscursive position e.
Homer, Aristotle, church fathers. These kind of authors are as old as our civilisation. Initiators of discursive practices — 19 th century Europe produced a singular kind of author, different from transdiscursive authors.
They not only produced their own work, but they laid down the possibility and rules of forming other texts. They provided ground not only for analogies to be adopted by future texts, but also made possible differences — they created a space for differing views within the field of discourse they initiated.
This, he says, is different from founding of any scientific endeavor. Foucault however says that the distinction between initiation of discursive practices and founding of sciences is not readily identifiable, and there is no proof that these two procedures are mutually exclusive.
His purpose behind bringing out this distinction was to show that "author-function" might be complex when we analyse each book or even a series of texts bearing a definite signature, but when we consider larger entities like groups of works or entire disciplines, author-function can be understood. Author-function, according to Foucault, is one possible specifications of the subject and, it appears that the form, the complexity and even the existence of author-function is not permanent.
The author as a centre was constructed to establish a unified meaning from the text, but now, text itself becomes meaning. The more visible marks of the author are wiped out. We characterize writing in two ways—critical and religious. In all works there is repression—certain ideas are suppressed]. Therefore commentary becomes necessary. The religious principle in writing makes it inalterable as the word of God.
Yet it is always a never fulfilled tradition the promised Heaven on Earth is always a promise. Aesthetic principle in writing makes it survive beyond the author. Thus this notion perpetrates the presence of the author. It is meaningless to repeat that the author has disappeared. Similarly, it is meaningless to keep repeating after Nietzsche that God and man have died a common death. Instead of this we must try to locate the space left empty by the disappearance of the author.
We have to watch for the openings created by the disappearance of the author. How does it function? Foucault is not offering any answer to these questions. He is only indicating the difficulties involved in the concept. It raises problems common to all proper names. A proper name is not a simple reference.
It has more than an indicative function. To say that Shakespeare did not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer did not exist. In the first case it means that nobody has the name Shakespeare. In the second case it means that several people were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the qualities traditionally ascribed to Homer.
It permits to group together texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. This means that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, nor that it is immediately consumable. On the other hand this discourse has in a given culture a certain status. Instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or characterizing its mode of being.
It is not located in the fiction of the work. A private letter may have a signer——but it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer —— but it does not have an author. Characteristics of the Author —Function. There are FOUR different characteristics for the author function. Discourses are objects of appropriation [ elements are borrowed in the creation of a new work.
When we write a sonnet, for example, we borrow the sonnet form. We know that all the works of Shakespeare are not original but appropriated ]. The ownership of a work is of a particular type, one that has been codified for many years.
The ownership of a work is always subsequent to penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors to the extent that authors became subject to punishment.
The possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing became an imperative peculiar to literature. It appeared that the authors by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practiced transgression and thereby restored danger to a writing which had the benefits of ownership. The author-function did not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way. It was not always the same types of texts which required attribution to an author. Their anonymity caused no difficulties.
Their ancientness was considered as sufficient guarantee of their status. They were the markers that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth. A reversal occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Scientific discourse began to be accepted as always re-demonstrable truth. The author function faded away. By the same token literary discourse came to be accepted only when endowed with the author-function.
In separating the author from his or her body of work, Foucault shifted literature into discourse, so that individual works become part of a larger body of texts. Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I believe, in the activity of the author function and in its modifications than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion.
Foucault, however, seemed to view the author as being implicated in a system of thought that was mired in personification and personalization that got in the way of the preferred object of study: the discourse. The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world?
The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author.
We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. He merely ended his essay by stating,. All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.
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