Foucault Argument Essay

What is an author? The definition of an author is not simply someone who picks up a pen and jots down a note. Not everything someone writes in their lifetime could even be considered a text, much less allow for them to be defined as an author. An author is more than the grammar they use. An author is more than the words they choose. There are standards that Foucault believes an author should be determined by, standards that involve how an author does wield language and the similarities of work, but that is not all that is used to define an author. An author is the one able to identify and explain discourses through their work, continuing the performance of the discourse and allowing for others to do the same. Foucault gives guidelines to

That is the question Foucault is tasked to answer with the standards the he has decided were the most precise to qualify an author. By following those standards, defining an author becomes much simpler. Starting with the traditional methods of identifying an author, we learn that an author is “a level of quality”(p. 1630, Foucault). This infers that an author always produces a certain level of work that is regarded as a kind of mastery of language specific to the person writing, unique to the individual accredited of writing the work. Modern critics adjust this standard to not be quite as strict, with their standard of an author and changes in one’s work being “caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence”(p. 1630, Foucault). This allows for the growth of an author to be taken into account when considering differences between works. Traditional and modernist critics that there needs to be a similarity in the writing. This consistency among texts is referred to as “a stylistic uniformity”(p. 1630, Foucault) by the traditional view, which sees this uniformity at something pointed to by choices in words or homogeneity among preferences. By modern standards, this constancy is found out by particular source of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity” (p. 1630, Foucault), which means an author is recognizable throughout all of their writing. Tradition believes that authors must also present an understanding of a subject, referred to as “a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence” (p. 1630, Foucault), and that by revealing their understanding, they prove themselves as an author. Tradition dictates that an author must have a point of historical reference to in which they relate particular events to the past, the text stating that by doing such the author “is thus a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge” (p. 1630, Foucault). This is not as much a