What is an Author?
"[I]n our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but it does not have an author; and similarly, an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author. . . [T]he function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society" (Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author" 124 ).
Slack, Miller, and Doak write of this concept of an author that it "is simply to note the fact certain discourses are granted the privilege of authorship while others are denied this privilege." ("The Technical Communicator as Author:" 12). They go on to exaplain that the Foucault's notion of authorship reverses what we typically think of as the author/discourse relationship: discourses create authors rather than authors creating discourses. "As such, authorship empowers certain certain authors while at the same time renders transparent the contributions of others." (12-13). In other words, a simple definition of author does not hold. In this view, one who originates or makes is not necessarily considered the author: only certain types of works have authors.
Notions of Author
Post-structuralism and Authors
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