What is an author?
According to Webster’s dictionary, an author is broadly described as "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work and can also be described as a writer.
Michael Foucault’s intense and powerful essay, “What is an author?, claims that the author is not a person at all, but a “function” or “figure” which occurred in construction with literature , only after the Renaissance. Since it is a historical construct, Foucault argues, the author can also be deconstructed. His essay calls for putting an end to this figure altogether and for establishing a new and different way of dealing with literary texts. At least some of the shocking questionability of this view is only superficial. Foucault does not argue that one day we discovered that literature is composed by individuals. Rather, he claims that only at a specific time did literary writers come to be treated as authors.
The difference is essential. All texts have writers, but only some have authors. To treat writers as authors, therefore, is to take a particular attitude toward their texts: it is to ask of them a certain type of question and to expect a certain type of answer. This attitude, Foucault claims, consists in trying to establish what the author of a text meant by it. We study literary texts in order to determine this constant and philosophical intention and subsequently to recapture the state of mind that led to their production.
“Author” is a fairly loose term used to refer to anyone who uses communication. An author could be one person or many people. An author could be someone who uses writing (like in a book), speech (like in a debate), visual elements (like in a TV commercial), audio elements (like in a radio broadcast), or even tactile elements (as is used in making Braille) to communicate. Whatever authors create, authors are human beings whose particular activities are affected by their individual backgrounds. Many factors affect authors’ backgrounds. These can include age, gender, geographic location, ethnicity, cultural experiences, religious experiences, social standing, personal wealth, sexuality, political beliefs, parents, peers, level of education, personal experience, and others. All of these are powerful influences on what authors assume about the world, who their audiences are, what and how they communicate, and the settings in which they communicate. Gender, ethnicity, cultural experiences, sexuality, and wealth factors are especially important in analyzing rhetorical situations today. Many professionals in education, business, government, and non-profit organizations are especially aware of these specific factors in people’s lives.
Like the term “author,” the term “audience” is also a fairly loose term. “Audience” refers to any recipient of communication. Audiences can read, hear, see, or feel different kinds of communication through different kinds of media. Also like authors, audiences are human beings whose particular activities are also affected by their specific backgrounds. The same sorts of factors that affect authors’ backgrounds also affect audiences’ individual backgrounds. Most importantly, these factors affect how audiences receive different pieces of communication; what they assume about the author; and the context in which they hear, read, or otherwise appreciate what the author communicates.