Traditional perception of reading
Dictating author (authority, guarantor of meaning)
Only one correct interpretation of text is possible (meaning is stable);
Critics tell us what that meaning is (mediated reading, explicated by more informed person)
Reader reads passively, looking for that one correct meaning.
Barthes
Author: S/he is not a creator but a scriptor, who collages intertextual citations.
The scriptor and the person who is writing are not one: “[T]o write is, through a prerequisite impersonality … to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’. What s/he means (authorial intentions) should never matter when a text is read.
Text: A linguistic unit that cannot be linked back to either the author (“[I]t is language which speaks, not the author”) or to reality, but does not have a single, stable, meaning.
Reader: The reader makes it all happen by reading and arrives at a variety of meanings: “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. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”.
Foucault
Author: S/he has a function (classificatory, regulatory, cohering, valorizing): “the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” and to dictate a certain mode of being of discourse” (which in turn gives him a certain status in a given culture.)
He attaches a regulatory role to what he calls “the author function” in terms of how texts are distributed and received in a social environment.
- The “author function” is linked to the legal system and arises as a result of the need to punish those responsible for transgressive statements.
- The “author function” does not affect all texts in the same way and in all types of civilization. For example, it doesn’t seem to affect scientific texts as much as it affects literary texts.
3) It has not traditionally been defined merely by the attribution of a discourse by its producer, but by a series of operations, such as the “criteria of authenticity proposed by Saint Jerome:
(a) If among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be with drawn from the list of the author’s works (Foucault’s criticism: the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value);
(b) The same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author’s other works (Foucault’s criticism: the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence);
(c) One must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer’s production (Foucault’s criticism: the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity);
(d) Finally, passages quoting statements that were made or mentioning events that occurred after the author’s death must be regarded as interpolated texts (Foucault’s criticism: the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events).
4) It does not refer to an individual, but gives rise to multiple points of view/individuals. A “philosopher” and a “poet” are not constructed in the same manner, and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from a modern novelist.