english final repost

English

Name of the Student

Institution of Affiliation

Respond to Foucault's "What is an Author?"

Foucault work has drawn a lot of ideas from history and sociology among other areas. The author of “What is an author?” began the writing by discussing the possibility of why people become knowledge subjects in some disciplines. Foucault has raised a number of questions concerning authorship through discussing the link between a text and an author. Foucault’s work is an inherent response to the popular essay called “the death of the author” that was done by Barthes. The main goal of the writing is to deal with the issue of author identity in terms of discursive politics and post-structuralism (Donald, 2010).

Foucault concluded that studying genre theories among other concepts are inferior compared to reading through the perspective of authorship. It is perhaps true that one can understand piece of work more clearly by seeing it through the eyes of the author. In other words, it is not the subject matter of a work that makes it significant, rather it is how the author has managed to arrange the work elements. Foucault is not in agreement with the belief that an author “dies” with creation or writing of a work. Indeed, according to the writer of this reading there is no ‘work’ without an author, hence he cannot be undermined. In other words Foucault the idea of disregarding the author of a work since it is only through the effort of the author that an audience is ‘born’ (Cusset, 2011).

Another issue raised by Foucault is what surrounds the name of an author. According to him, the name of an author is his description with very many meanings. The name of an author according to this writer signifies the body of his work. This according to me means that an author’s name holds a function that is classificatory. In other words, an author is not just an ordinary person; rather he is a symbol that represents some work. For instance, in the writing, Foucault talks of Hermes Trismegistus who never existed but had several works that were done under his name.

Another issue that has been handled by Foucault is the ownership idea in association a piece of work. Some centuries ago, there were works like comedy writing that were done and submitted without the requirement of an author. Nevertheless, still in those periods, there were works that could not be accepted or published without the name of the author. Such works included natural science, cosmology and geography. Reading Foucault text, one interprets that for a text to be well understood, then its link to the author or lack of the author is important. An author indeed represents more than just his work, he also represents a belief. Nevertheless, Foucault main idea is that work should be considered in accordance to its content rather than just on who did the work. I believe just like Foucault that an author is important in any writing. But just like he insists I also believe that a piece of work should be sold because of its content but not just because of the name of the author.

Respond to Barthes's "The Death of the Author."

Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is a 20th century literature, postmodernism, post structuralism and literary theory. According to Barthes, an author is more than just an ‘individual’; he is also a historically and socially constituted entity (Thody, 2010). Barthes also states that an author only come into existence after establishment of work. This is to say that an author is made by his work; rather it is not a work that is made by the author. From Barthes’s writing, it is also clear that a reader has also great power on writing. Though writing can be linked to a certain writer, a reader ha an ability to alter, add or edit the work of an author hence making authorship a collective duty rather than just having a single origin. The reader also has power over reading since he can chose his own style of reading and even chose his own emphasis. He can also re-arrange text in way that it brings out the meaning that he intends.

I have noted that Barthes greatly opposes the idea that an author intentionally makes a masterpiece. According to him authors only duplicate expressive pattern of which they are not necessarily emotionally connected. This means that an author cannot be interpreted according to the piece of work he does. This also means that a writer biography has no connection to the wiring done. Barthes insists in his essay that writing brings destruction to all voices and points of origin. In other words, writing is a form of craft, a language with no special expression being connected to the text. Reading this text, I get the feeling that the reader has more power on a text, even than the author since he can rewrite or reinterpret the reading in ways that pleases him.

I tend to agree that the only way that interpretive tyranny can be separated from a reader is through separating a work from the author. It is also true that different people can read the same text and come up with different meanings hence making the author les s powerful in writing. At one point, Barthes compares text to a textile that is made from many cultural backgrounds but not from an individual. It is not the passions of an author that determines the meaning of writing; rather it is the reader’s impression. Unity of as a text is determined by its audience or destination rather than y the creator (Andrew, 2011).

In short, an author only duty is to script, but the interpretation is the job of a reader. This argument can be true, but again one must consider that interpretation only comes with the content provided. Though I greatly agree with Barthes, I also tend to think that the author is also very important in writing since he is in charge of research and content. If the content is not good, then the readers will also have nothing to benefit from the writing. This means that an author is equally important in writing just like the reader.

References

Andrew, R. (2011). An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes: Death of the Author. https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-barthes-4/

Cusset, F. (2011). French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

Donald F. (2010). Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault .Cornell University Press

Thody, P. (2010). Book review of Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes; trans. Stephen Heath. Review in The American Journal of Sociology