Author

==Philosophical views of the nature of authorship==
{{expand section|information about any theories of authorship other than postmodern ones. What do other philosophers think of authorship?|date=August 2021}}
[[File:James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915 cropped.jpg|thumb|227x227px|[[James Joyce]] was a prominent Irish novelist, poet and literary critic during the 20th century.]]
In literary theory, critics find complications in the term ''author'' beyond what constitutes authorship in a legal setting. In the wake of [[postmodern literature]], critics such as [[Roland Barthes]] and [[Michel Foucault]] have examined the role and relevance of authorship to the meaning or interpretation of a literary text.

Barthes challenges the idea that a text can be attributed to any single author. He writes, in his essay "Death of the Author" (1968), that "it is language which speaks, not the author."<ref name="barthes">{{Citation
| last = Barthes
|first = Roland |
chapter = The Death of the Author |
year = 1968 |
title = Image, Music, Text |publisher = Fontana Press |
publication-date = 1997 | isbn = 0-00-686135-0}}</ref> The words and language of a text itself determine and expose meaning for Barthes, and not someone possessing legal responsibility for the process of its production. Every line of written text is a mere reflection of references from any of a multitude of traditions, or, as Barthes puts it, "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture"; it is never original.<ref name="barthes"/> With this, the perspective of the author is removed from the text, and the limits formerly imposed by the idea of one authorial voice, one ultimate and universal meaning, are destroyed. The explanation and meaning of a work does not have to be sought in the one who produced it, "as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us."<ref name="barthes"/> The psyche, culture, fanaticism of an author can be disregarded when interpreting a text, because the words are rich enough themselves with all of the traditions of language. To expose meanings in a written work without appealing to the celebrity of an author, their tastes, passions, vices, is, to Barthes, to allow language to speak, rather than author.

Michel Foucault argues in his essay "What is an author?" (1969) that all authors are writers, but not all writers are authors. He states that "a private letter may have a signatory—it does not have an author."<ref name="Foucault">{{Citation |
last = Foucault |
first = Michel |
chapter = What is an Author? |
year = 1969 |
editor-last = Harari |
editor-first = Josué V. |
title = Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism |
publisher = Cornell University Press |
place = Ithaca, NY |
publication-date = 1979 }}</ref> For a reader to assign the title of author upon any written work is to attribute certain standards upon the text which, for Foucault, are working in conjunction with the idea of "the author function."<ref name="Foucault"/> Foucault's author function is the idea that an author exists only as a function of a written work, a part of its structure, but not necessarily part of the interpretive process. The author's name "indicates the status of the discourse within a society and culture," and at one time was used as an anchor for interpreting a text, a practice which Barthes would argue is not a particularly relevant or valid endeavour.<ref name="Foucault"/>

Expanding upon Foucault's position, [[Alexander Nehamas]] writes that Foucault suggests "an author [...] is whoever can be understood to have produced a particular text as we interpret it," not necessarily who penned the text.<ref>{{Citation |
last = Hamas |
first = Alexander |
title = What An Author Is |
journal = The Journal of Philosophy |
volume = 83 |
issue = 11 |
pages = 685–691 |
publisher = Eighty-Third Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division |date=November 1986
 |doi=10.5840/jphil1986831118}}</ref> It is this distinction between producing a written work and producing the interpretation or meaning in a written work that both Barthes and Foucault are interested in. Foucault warns of the risks of keeping the author's name in mind during interpretation, because it could affect the value and meaning with which one handles an interpretation.

Literary critics Barthes and Foucault suggest that readers should not rely on or look for the notion of one overarching voice when interpreting a written work, because of the complications inherent with a writer's title of "author." They warn of the dangers interpretations could suffer from when associating the subject of inherently meaningful words and language with the personality of one authorial voice. Instead, readers should allow a text to be interpreted in terms of the language as "author."