Foucault’s Theory Of The Author

In this paper, the author carried out related researches in Foucault’s theory of author in order toinvestigate a number of issues through Foucault’s theories and gain more understanding of Foucault’s ideas.Michel Foucault is a challenging and rebellious20th century French thinker, who is called the "20thcentury French Nietzsche" and " France’s most important thinker after Sartre ", and he is a group leader ofpost-structuralism and post-modernism. Specifically, as an intellectual giant, Foucault’s concern aboutliterature has a huge influence on the trend of structuralism and post-structuralism, and his concentratedefforts on the concept of the author make the author exists outside the text and before the formation of thetext. Foucault published the article What is the author in1969, with the proposal of "death of the author",Foucault presented its core concept of the theory-the author function. Foucault’s definition of the coreconcept of the theory is that it epitomizes the characteristics of the existence, circulation and operation ofcertain discourse in a society. Therefore, the core of Foucault’s theory of author is its functionalsignificance.For the internal impact, the functional significance of the theory shows four different internal features,namely, function is the product of the law, and this system will clearly express the range of discourse; in theculture we live in, the authors of different types of text are distinct in different times, and the way theauthor function affects the discourse changes with the time and different cultural patterns;"Author"constructed as a specific rational existence is to be accomplished through a complex series of critics efforts;the author function generated from the cracks between the author and the narrator and exits there, whichlaw exists generally in the literary and scientific discourse. The four different features play a supportingrole in the theory of author from the inside.For the external impact, Foucault’s theory of the function of author produced multi-level andmulti-dimensional impacts, respectively, since Foucault considered in literature the author is not a generalproper noun, but a function of discourse, which is to lead a specific person go from a discourse to a broaderoutside world, and therefore the meaning of author becomes richer; in terms of the new historicism,Foucault thinks that the idea of discourse makes literary texts open to a larger practical areas; the novel itself is history, so text can not only produce new objects, but even produce new subjects, therefore,Foucault’s theory of author become the methodology of which constitute the new historicism; Foucault’stheory of discursive practice is an important concept, and it produces multiple effects on archeology anddiscourse analysis; another important concept in Foucault’s theory "power" theory is also under theframework of the theory of author, whose position in the literature is even more prominent, and Foucault’stheory of author actually expands the meaning of discourse, making the power is even more important onthe basis of discourse.On the basis of archeology and subjective criticism Foucault’s theory of author uses the means ofdiscourse analysis from the historical perspective to provide us with a new theory of author different fromthe traditional one, thus making inspirations for our literary and cultural studies.