Author

• Published in: Victorian literature and culture Vol. 46; no. 3-4; pp. 577 - 580
• Main Author: Elfenbein, Andrew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01-01-2018
• Subjects: Critics; Literary criticism; Metonymy; Michael Foucault; Modernity; Text analysis; Truth; Writing; Written language; New York; United States > US
• DOI: 10.1017/S1060150318000281
• EISSN: 1470-1553
• ISSN: 1060-1503

In a typical literary critical essay, the author, rather than being a consistent concept, shifts rapidly among different, sometimes incompatible assumptions, evidence, and purposes: a biographical person, a synonym for the narrator, an implied presence governing an entire work, a metonym lending coherence to a career, an item in a list characterizing a movement or a period, the receiver or producer of literary or contextual influences. Literary critics have not ignored Foucault's “What is an Author?” but they have skipped its relevance to their own practice.1 The large question of “What is an author?” has blocked the smaller but more pressing question, “What should an author be in a work of literary criticism?” I list some familiar manifestations of the author found in much literary criticism. Author as Biographical Fact: Although authorial texts are open to interpretation, biographical facts usually occupy the status of unquestioned truth in literary critical essay. [...]these facts are held to be relevant to criticism, as if the New Critics had never raised the possibility of the biographical fallacy.3 What puzzles me most is that life is assumed to be an obvious and straightforward origin for writing.