Author

The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Author

Author: In traditional literary usage, the writer of a text, or, more broadly, the person deemed responsible for its creation and for controlling its meaning or meanings. In the 1940s, with the advent of the New Criticism, the role of the author came under scrutiny, with William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley coining the term intentional fallacy to reject the practice of basing textual interpretation on an author’s intentions. Subsequently, structuralist and poststructuralist theorists questioned the whole idea of authorship. In “The Death of the Author” (1967), Roland Barthes, a structuralist who was transitioning to poststructuralism, viewed the author not as an original and creative master and manipulator of the linguistic system but, rather, as one of its primary vehicles, a “scriptor” who is “born simultaneously with his text.” Dethroning the author in favor of the reader as the focus of writing, Barthes argued that a text “does not consist of a line of words releasing a single ’theological’ meaning (the ’message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original.” In his essay “What Is an Author?” (1969), Michel Foucault, a French philosophical historian most often associated with the new historicism, analyzed the author as “a function of discourse,” a “functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses” among “the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations.”