You Think You Know... But You Have No Idea...

Foucault’s “What is an Author?” explains the idea of the significance of the author. In contrast with Barthes idea that the author does not exist, Foucault believes that the author does exists.

Foucault raises an idea that the “function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourse”, meaning the authors job is bring in an identity or meaning of some aspect into the text – whether it be literary or not. Depending on the authors discourse and writing style, the reader will be able to figure out a sense of who the author is and what he or she is like.

Upon surfing the web for a blog relating to Foucault’s theory, I stumbled upon Dr. Chris Chesher’s blog that talks about the idea of blogging and its crisis of authorship. Within his post, Chesher discusses how blogs carry on and in some cases “transform” the notion of authorship.

Despite my lack of blogging experience, blogs for others are the latest trend. More and more we are seeing blogs being used for journalism purposes, diary purposes, or even educational purposes. Given that blogs can be publicly personalized while remaining private at the time, Chesher believes that certain features bring up Foucault’s author function more effectively than other web technology. “The inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers” reveals to many a sense of authorship in a different context.

When one writes a blog, they often create a name of which to go by in their posts. As they write, they bring a sense of style and voice as Chesher says to the blog. So as readers stumble upon the blog and read these posts, they have no idea who the “author” is. For the readers, they start to “attribute a text to an imagined writer.” Each post created by the name is supposed to reveal information about the supposed authors voice, personality, style, etc.

Which makes me wonder, after you have stumbled across this blog numerous times, reading my posts for class each week, do you feel as though you have me, the author, figured out yet? Am I living up to your expectations?