Commentary: In the Name of the Author

Abstract

Is it possible? Deep in woods of academe, a few New Historicists have not yet heard of it, that Foucault is dead! matter who's speaking? quoth graduate student, quot ing, say, Stephen Orgel, quoting Foucault quoting Beckett.2 The implied answer?No matter at all?takes for granted that writers, texts, and specific author functions (Homer, Ovid, Mohammed, Shakespeare, Ignoto, Freud, Beckett, or Foucault himself) are merely symptomatic of discourses that produced them. Decades after publication of What is an Author? it remains a familiar critical move to represent privileged literary (as opposed to scientific) writers of a given historical moment or social milieu as a choir of voices all singing, though sometimes discordantly, sometimes namelessly, to same tune and key. In my own neck of literary woods?a period of study once known, all-too-humanistically, as the English Renaissance, lately cor rected to Early Modern, by a dominant discourser?our critical vision has become so overclouded by our Foucauldian goggles that we have mistaken our discursive forestry for trees. As seen through those well worn lenses, literary landscape from smallest shrub to mightiest oak looks more or less same. The particular name by which each plant is called hardly matters?except, of course, as a signifier of relative market value. Anonymous texts?unidentified greenery, mostly weeds?may be of critical interest as well, but only to illustrate discursive practices, whether in early modern Britain or on Internet. Reality check: In actual practice, questions Who wrote it? and Who said it? are no less important to literary scholars than to respondents taking SAT subject test or TV game-show quizzes where such queries are most likely to be encountered. Foucault's question begs a thoughtful answer at each stage in development of a