3 Answers

  1. A better answer than Michel Foucault gave — “the author is a way of grouping texts” – has not yet been invented. Because everything else either only interferes with our relationship with the text (for example, the knowledge that this great book was written by this not very nice person who offended his wife and said all sorts of stupid things in an interview), or is completely contained in the text and is its property. But the special relationship that connects this text with some others and allows us to believe that the elements of similarity between them are deeply non-random, and the differences deserve special reflection-this is really very important.

  2. There are several classical meanings of the term. It should be noted that the author can be understood as a real, biographical person who is the creator of certain works. This is a parameter that is outside the artistic world of the work. Such an “external” border of the term embeds the category of author in a number of contexts, for example, legal and business (copyright), textual (author of the Word about Igor's regiment), or, for example, socio-mythological (historical anecdotes and idle fictions about the author as an inevitable component of his “reputation”).

    If we turn to a work of art, then the main and, perhaps, the most important meaning of the term will be the following: the author is the guarantor of artistic integrity, consistency of the text; the author can be understood intentionally, that is, as a force that creates and directs the dynamically constructive artistic world of the work. That is, we will find the author in the text, but rather not at the level of” author's assessment”, opinions that are so diligently taught in school, but at the level of conceptual observations on the main and auxiliary laws of the text. Once again, and in other words: the text somehow reveals traces of the author's will. The simplest example is the title of a work. Most often, it is not exactly random, that is, it has a conceptual meaning, and can be considered as one of the most important elements of the text, its markers. The title directs our perception, that is, by doing so, we accurately take into account the author's will, which is also an obstacle to the reader's voluntarism.

    Perhaps the most difficult and most important nuance in understanding the problem of authorship is, let's say, the personal relationship of the writer with the word, which sheds light on the concept of artistic style, which is clearly different from what is called styles in linguistics. The unique history of a unique interpretation of the language is captured in an artistic style. By the way, this shows that an author can only be named as an author over time. In the history of art, the problem of authorship is directly related to the understanding of the personal principle, which is weakly characteristic of early cultures. For example, John is not the author of the Gospel, which is emphasized both by its concept (John is like a scriptwriter-mediator who writes down the will of God) and by the title itself (the Gospel of John).

    Finally, we note that the author as an internal category of the text is associated with a number of more contextual meanings. Let's assume that the author's image is a concept that makes sense in the context of the specific narrative of epic and lyric-epic works. In such a case, the author simultaneously converges or even becomes an element of the character structure (the image of the author in Eugene Onegin).

    Well, and so on. This conversation is extremely extensive.

  3. an author is a subject of action in art, science, and technology. For example, in philosophy there is no longer an author as well as a subject, but only his thinking, philosophy is not a text, but a dialogue, which is not in the text, but the author [subject] of the text has it, and its reader may have it, or it is impossible if the ability to dialogue is absent.

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