Writing has freed itself ...

Writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression... it is a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Before: Narrative = immortality.
Now: authors must assume the role of dead men to make accomplished writing, he can't be present in his own text.

We can't take full measure of the author's disappearance because we are obsessed with analyzing works but cannot define what constitutes a work of literature without understanding the writer as an author. Writing is another way that maintains the existence of the author because, since we hold it to such high standards, the style of the writing itself gives away the author who wrote it. An author's name functions as a way to classify a work. It receives a certain status because author's names are not interchangable. If they were, we would have entirely different ways of thinking about the work. It contains status. It didn't always have to be the author that gave a text status; writing down a well-known epic could be done anonymously in the past because the history of the text was all the status the writing needed.



Now, in order to think something is good or true, we must have an author to attach to it. The author contains the work's context and history. If the author wishes to remain anonymous, it becomes a game for the reader to discover who wrote it because anonymity in literature is intolerable. Authors are identified by a set of rules critics impose upon their writings. Because the author's name does not pass by us like an ordinary person's name it gives rise to an Author-function. A private letter has a signer but not an author. A grafitti artist has a writer but not an author. An author must purposefully circulate his material throughout his society. Ownership of writing began as a way to punish people if their writing was transgressive, illicit, blasphemous, or profane. Author is determined by the consistent quality of his works, the coherence of his ideology, the constancy of his style, and as a fixed figure in history. All works possessing the author-function posses a plurality of self. Initiators of discursivity give rise to works that either reject or broaden the concept intiated but can still be drawn back to the original concept.