The Relationship Between Agency/Power and The Author

            Think of a scene from a movie. In this scene you have two people arguing about a missing dress. In this scene, the person speaking is the one that has the agency. When the other person decides to begin speaking, then the agency shifts. It shifts because the person that is currently acting changed and that person is the one who has agency in the situation. When someone is composing a book, that person has the agency, and therefore controls the agency of the characters in the book since they’re in control of the rhetorical situations occurring. Granted, this idea of agency is not the same for all the different schools of thought, but it’s how I think about it .

            Agency can be taken away from the agent depending on the situation. In the scene with the two people arguing, the person who speaks has the agency in the moment. Granted, that can easily change depending on who is speaking and in control of the moment. Agency can be improved when someone takes more control of the situation, but like I said earlier, it can be lost. It’s a natural thing to some people but some people need to work on improving and enhancing their agency especially when they’re in a situation with someone who has a more dominant sense of agency.

           
Agency is not necessarily the same thing as power, but they’re related because you can gain agency the same way you can gain more power in a situation. The more control you have over a situation the more power you presumably have over it as well as agency. When someone is composing a book, the author has the power over what goes on in the book. Foucault spoke about how power can negatively affect agency because of “how it circulated and exchanged through discourse” (Herrick 247). Having too much power over a situation can be bad because of the potential harm one can cause to the other person in the rhetorical exchange.  People can always cross their limits, and people don’t necessarily like to be on the receiving end of an exchange like that especially when they’re being dominated.

            An author obviously has power over their work, since they control what happens in the piece. It is impossible for an author not to have power concerning the work because if they were not there to compose the piece then it wouldn’t get done the way it was originally intended. Regarding the circulation and discourse of what is going on, I think much it of depends on the moral character of the people. A person with good morals will act differently than someone who doesn’t. Granted, one can always learn morals and improve their situations according to Aristotle. Because of that, the way a character acts in a book could be completely different at the end of the book than from the beginning of the book. 

            Not only does the author have power and agency over what they compose, but they also have power and agency over the type of audience they want to address. It is possible for an author to write for a specific audience. For example, the Twilight series was not written for an audience of male intellectuals. Same goes with any Barbie book. Some authors compose books than can be appreciated and loved by multiple types of audiences, not necessarily one. An example of that is, Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”.

            The relationship between the agency and the author is essentially the amount of power they have over their work. The author needs a certain level of agency and power in order to effectively compose a piece. Also, the title has agency/power together because to me, they both work together in a given situation. They are both increased and decreased in the same way. 

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1975. 3-25 (Book I, Chapters 1-6), 117-141 (Book III, Chapters 1-3).

Herrick, James A. The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, Third Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2005.