Postmodernism and Authors
Post-structuralists challenge traditional notions of authorship by challenging the author's control over the text. For example, reader-response critics would argue that what readers bring to a text has as much to do with how a reader interprets a text as what the author writes. Similarly, social constructionists argue that authors themselves are written by their cultures; authorship is a social construct and is granted by certain communities (academic, professional, etc.) as Foucault has argued:
"[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).
Postmodernism and Texts
The Implications of Postmodernism
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