On The Author Issue In Michel Foucault’s Theoretical Vision

The author issue has been the center in the study of literary criticism, which is always being discussed and paid great attention to by philosophers and critics. From ancient Greece to Middle Ages, then to the Renaissance Period, the main-stream understanding of author has remained to the original identification of the author. It is Michel Foucault who modified the concept of author tremendously and provided a whole new viewpoint to the research of author issue. The purpose of this thesis is to clarify Michel Foucault’s author theory systematically on the basis of his power theory and his theory of subject. The paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter is the introduction in which the previous study both domestically and abroad are reviewed and criticized, based on which the aim of this paper is argued.In the second part, the article reviews the understanding on the author’s nature and position of Michel Foucault. In the era before Foucault, the author were seen as a subject of the society, from whom works were created and originated; the concept of author has been modified by Foucault who take it as a set of subjects of society, or in another word, a family unity of a certain system of texts, simply a symbol of literary discourse. The original concept of author can be dated back to 17th century which is now greatly changed and disappearing. The position of author has undergone tremendous change since Foucault. The author used to be the ruler of the literary world, the producer of works and the origination of texts. Foucault argued that the author is simply a carrier of culture and literary discourses of a certain era which is restricted by the knowledge system, discourses and institutions of society at that time. The author is no longer the maker of discourses, on the contrary, they are just the agent of discourses, and their position has suffered a disastrous decline.The third part of this paper discusses the main points of Foucault’s author function theory. He claims that the "author" is more like a set of beliefs or assumptions governing the production, circulation and consumption of texts, rather than a hypostatic figure. Another great theorist Roland Barthes of the Post-Structuralism era also has a strong negative point of view towards the leading position of the author, meanwhile argued the eminent assertion of "death of author". What different from Foucault’s opinion is Roland Barthes’restrictions to the author-not like the former’s power of society (ideas, discourses and society institutions), are the abstract language system and discourse institutions.The fourth part concerns the Post-Structural author theory of both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and tries to make a more reasonable and realistic point based on the comparison between them.