Author Author, What's Your Function?

Foucault's project in "What is an Author?" involves examining the curious relationship between the text and the author, especially in light of the (then) recent disappearance of the traditional author as source or origin of the text's meaning. His interest lies in the function of the author's name, not an author's name. The presence of the author's name--that is, any author's name for any text that needs to be understood as being authored, as having an author--serves to classify or give a certain status to certain types of discourse. The author of the "author function" is not an individual but a function of discourse. Foucault is explicitly not interested in a "sociocultural analysis of the author as an individual" or the "system of valorization" that gives authors their artistic status and generates interest in the "man and his work ." For the purposes of his study of the author-function, he has to set aside certain questions that he nevertheless believes merit attention, such as "How is an author individualized in a culture such as ours?"

That question of course informs Foucault's analysis of the author-function (especially in his discussion of the author-function's connection to the legal system) but I would like you to explore it more fully and in a different way for next week's post (due Wednesday, 11/3, by 7 p.m.). Here's the plan:

Recently The Paris Review made its entire archive of author interviews free to the public (which in my opinion is perhaps the greatest thing that has ever happened on the Internet). Go to the archive and read one of the interviews. Choose an author whose work you know. As you are reading, consider the following:

• What kinds of questions are being asked?
• What connections are being made between the writer and his or her work, by the interviewer and by the writer?
• What assumptions about the writer inform the interviewer's questions?
• What does the interviewer assume the reader wants to know?
• How does the writer conceptualize his own or her own figuring as an artist?
• In other words, how does he or she seem to feel about the way he or she is represented or how his or her work is understood?

More generally, consider:

• Why are we interested in this author as an individual?
• What kind of individual do we assume he or she is?
• What status does he or she have?
• How do we valorize the author? How are we simultaneously valorizing certain types of writing or texts?
• How does the interview process (and the presence of the interview in The Paris Review) serve to give the author his or her cultural status?

Compose your post from a consideration of these questions, rather than answering them in succession. Include a summary of and a link to the interview in your post.