Crusade against the author

Abstract

The twentieth century saw a whole range of disciplines within the field of social sciences struggle to come to terms with a relativisation of some of the fundamental concepts of traditional thinking, such as communication, text, meaning, existence, and reality. Inevitably, the heuristic, intuitive notion of the author as "the one who writes" also started to fray around the edges. Our article presents a short overview of some modern theoretical thinking that has tackled the que+stion of the author in this new context. We mention the New Critics, who refused to seek the author's intention and endeavoured to interpret literary works as autonomous entities. We then discuss Roland Barthes and his conception of literary work as part of an indefinite textual field; in this conception Barthes considers the question of an author as entirely irrelevant. Then we focus our attention on how the problem of the author is addressed by Michel Foucault. He treats the author as a concept, explores its discursive implications, and examines the modalities of its functioning. In the final part of the article we focus on certain marks of cult of personality that can be observed in authors at the end of the twentieth century as well as today. As a referential framework for our analysis, we employ the relation between the concept of the author and the essentialist notion of a determinate meaning of a literary text.