1. Postmodern Theories on Author Some Preliminary Ideas & Overview

2. Outline General Issues Post-Structuralist Theorists (textuality vs. originality) Roland Barthes Michel Foucault Derrida Metafictionists The Death and Return of the Author, How? The Death and Return of the Author Feminists? Feminists

3. General Issues Author Creativity and originality   ‘ Nothing is created out of nothing. ’ Author-ity (author-god) (omnipresence, omniscience) Relations with readers Authorship (of a text, of one ’ s life, of history) and Subjectivity Text Definitions of work, text, discourse, ecriture “ Death ” or inscription of the author, the multiple “ I ” Textual frames and boundaries

4. Background New Criticism and Formalism –’ objective correlatives ’ or objective meanings Structuralism – langue, structure Poststructuralism – textuality

5. Roland Barthes Work & Text – differences in terms of method (product/process), genres(limit/breaking), signs (closure/infinite deferment), plurality (final/passage and intertextual), filiation (organism/network), reading/play (consumption/text plays, play the text as if it were a musical score), pleasure (pleasure/jouissance). Author & Reader

6. Roland Barthes (2) The Pleasure of the Text – “ As institution, the author is dead: his civic status, his biographical person have disappeared... But in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure...as he needs mine... “ (qtd Burke 29) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes : Barthes (who will ‘ eat a plum, take a piss ’ ) R.B., he, ‘ I ’.

7. Michel Foucault “ What is an Author? ” Two parts of his article – 1. “ What does it matter who is speaking? ” – to the concluding answer that it does not matter; also introduction of the contemporary denial of author; 2. Re-definition of author as author function and discursive founders.

8. Metafictionists "If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world... God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist... “ “ Oh God comma I abhor self- consciousness. ” ("Title," Lost in the Funhouse, p. 110.) E.g. The French Lieutenant ’ s Woman, John Barth ’ s novels, Slaughterhouse-V (& other novels by Vonnegut), Stuntman, Icicle Thief, etc.

9. Death and Return of the Author, How? Expansion of the definition of ‘ author ’ to include readers and critics. “...the secondary becomes primary, the supplement is at the origin; criticism finds itself within literature ” (Burke 160) More specific theories on authorship are needed.

10. Feminists? Feminist K ü nstlerinroman – constructing an artist subjectivity by writing one ’ s self into a “ re-visioned ” history (problematic inscription of authorial selves into a re-written history) e.g. theories of postmodern historiography, feminist autobiography, etc.

11. Reference Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh UP, 1998