The Author
The historian of authorship Martha Woodmansee refers to the ‘contemporary usage’ of the word author as ‘an individual who is solely responsible – and thus exclusively deserving of credit – for the production of a unique, original work’ and ‘genius’ as ‘someone who does something utterly new, unprecedented’, “someone who produces something that never existed before’ (Bennett 7).

“The establishment of print as a major form of social communication in the centuries following the Gutenberg print revolution meant also the development of print as a commodity and textual production as a profession. Demands for books created a demand for authors to write and produce them” (Editor’s Introduction, Reader 275).

“The decision to publish, not the creation of a text is, then the first step in the creation of a book” (Adams and Barker, Reader 54).

Everything that is printed and published has been written by someone. His or her identity may be concealed, disguised, or forgotten but there is a human intelligence behind every word that has ever been put into print (Feather, Companion 232).

“[T]he Romans called the poet vates, [Sir Philip] Sidney tells us, ‘a diviner, foreseer, or prophet’, and the Greeks gave us the word ‘poet’, from poiein, ‘to make’” (Bennett 3).

“A poet like Homer is a back-formation, a retrojection or retrospective figuration and mythologization of individual authorship” (Bennett 34).

“[M]anuscripts were produced entirely for the Catholic church, in line with religious interest in upholding the authority of the church and its teaching” “‘Authors’ did exist if the personal writing was more important than the material composed by others, which was then used to confirm his own” (Finkelstein & McCleery 67).

“Authority was something that could reside in a text independent of its link to an ‘author’. Texts by Ovid or Augustine were not associated with the names of the author, but with the truth of the text itself. ‘Well into the early modern period it was age, authenticity and conformity with truth, not individual genius, that was thought to confer authority on texts and authors’ (Wogan-Browne et al. 1999:6) (Finkelstein & McCleery 67).

“Authorship in Chaucer’s time (1330-1400), … ‘was more likely to be understood as participation in the intellectually and morally authoritative tradition within which… a writer might fill one of several roles, copying, modifying, or translating, as well as composing’. Authors were understood to be part of a collectivity who reshaped material for their purpose, originating material that glossed on and linked to other material in the same intellectual activity… (Finkelstein & McCleery 69).

“Embedded within this ‘Romantic’ or ‘modern’ sense of authorship is an implicit assumption that the author of a work is in control of that work, knows what it means and intends something by it, that she delimits and defines its interpretations” (Bennett 8).

“And it is a tradition that has given us the sense of the ‘superb and solitary romantic figure of the sovereign author’, … whose ‘primary or final intention contains the meaning of the work and whose biography commands its writing with transparent immediacy’” (Bennett 4).

Writing is first of all an ACT “placed in the bipolar field of sacred and profane, the licit and illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership” (Foucault, Reader, 285).

“The author is both him- or herself, individual, unique, a one-off and at the same time, as author, more than this, a general and ‘universal’ figure, a figure that goes beyond its own genesis, its own origins in and as a particular, unique individual” (Bennett 10).

“[I]n composing a text, in ‘writing’ something, the one producing something is […] alone […] I must be isolated from everyone” (Ong, Reader 143).

“Post-structuralism [involves] a radical skepticism towards the integrity of a subject’s thoughts, meaning and intentions’” (Bennett 10).

“‘Authorship’ [is] a cultural formation inseparable from the commodification of literature: literary reputation could and did shape cultural responses to texts in a manner not accounted for by Barthesian analysis” (Editor’s Introduction, Reader 275).

“In Foucault’s view, the modern author is to be viewed less as an ‘essence’ and more as a ‘function’ emerging from within various technological and social conditions. Foucault’s ‘author’ in this case, as one critic has succinctly noted, is ‘a name that circulates independently of the individual and functions at once as the signatured assertion of a property right, and as a vehicle for whatever significance or reputation that name has come to acquire’” (Cardiner 2000: 256; Wernick, 1993; Chartier 1994: 29-59) (Finkelstein & McCleery 82).

“As he returns in literary criticism or literary sociology the author is both dependent and constrained. He is dependent in that he is not the unique master of the meaning of his text, and his intentions, which provided the impulse to produce the text, are not necessarily imposed either on those who turn his text into a book (bookseller-publishers or print workers) or on those who appropriate it by reading it” (Chartier 28).

Bibliography
Bennett, Andrew. The Author. 2005.
Chartier, Roger. “Figures of the Author” in The Order of Books. 1992.
Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. 2005.