Definition
A term traditionally used to describe the person who originates a piece of writing. Like many other literary terms in recent years the "idea of the author" has been the subject of an increasingly rigorous analysis, which is to say—in the language of contemporary theory—"author" has been "theorized."
Theorists see the term as intimately related to authority. In the middle ages, "auctores" were those figures, such as Aristotle, who were the fundamental "authorities" on their subjects. As the world grew more complex in the Renaissance, respect for "authority" weakened in favor of valuing individual initiative. One example might be the development in Protestantism of the emphasis on individual interpretation of the Bible, a central issue of the Reformation; another, the emphasis in capitalism on the individual entrepreneur as opposed to the collective economy of feudalism. In this climate "author" came to be associated with a creative person honored less as an authority than as an example of individual creativity and freedom.In one respect, however, the notion of authority clung to the term. Defining the author as the "creator" of a work implied that its meaning derived from its creator, that in seeking to arrive at a meaning readers should attempt to recapture the author's intention. In the mid-20th century the New Criticism launched an attack on this conception, categorizing this thinking as an example of the intentional fallacy.But an even more radical challenge was raised by the partisans of poststructuralism. They argued that the notion of the author as an autonomous, individual creator should give way to a less powerful conception: the author as a culturally conditioned "subject" who participates in the production of a text but is merely one among many who contribute to its multiple meanings. Roland Barthes rendered this position dramatically in his celebrated essay "The Death of the author." Barthes argued that reference to the author as the originating point of a text maintains the illusion of determinate meaning as opposed to the reality of indeterminacy, the principle that there is no such thing as a "correct" interpretation of a literary text.Just as the 19th-century philosopher Nietzsche had, in announcing "the death of God," depicted a world from which order and meaning had fled, so Barthes wished to remove the text's creator: "The removal of the author . . . is not merely an historical fact, it utterly transforms the modern text." The negation of the author results in the increased significance of the reader who is the "destination" of the text: "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination."Barthes's position was modified in turn by Michel Foucault, who defined the author as a function of the relations between the reader and the text. Foucault appears to agree with Barthes in calling for an end to the "author" conceived of as an individual who is the origin and, in the capitalist tradition, the "owner" of a piece of writing. In its place is the writer-as-subject, a creature of cultural institutions and the practice of discourse.Behind the revolutionary rhetoric of Barthes and Foucault lies a call for unlimited openness in the interpretation of texts, a resistance to any kind of critical closure. Their attack on the traditional conception of the author is a specific example of the general program of poststructuralism with its critique of individual identity and its insistence on the instability of meaning.
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