Foucault and the author function

In this week’s blog post I am going to try to decipher Foucault’s idea of an “author function” from my understanding of the text. I think that the “author function” as Foucault describes it is a very complex and in my uneducated opinion overly complicated view on what an author actually is and how it is different from a writer. Foucault in this article discusses how the author, writer and narrator can be physically the same person but, how they may each have an alter ego and can therefore act as different personas despite the fact that the ideas we interpret and words that we see written on a piece of paper are coming from the same entity. Foucault also suggests, according to my understanding of the article that we as the reader or even literary critic need to stop thinking about an author as a persona who is above us and who we look up to in a mythical or god like fashion but, that we need to separate the ideas from the persona and examine each as individual.
I personally believe that it is impossible from what I have read to separate the author as a person from the ideas which the author represents. I think that this goes back to the ideas that differentiate between the author and the writer and what makes each what it is. I think that the four parts of Foucault’s ideas on the author function make the idea of an author and a writer as one unified entity more or less obsolete and allow us to look at the author and the ideas individual and autonomous from one another. I think that like Foucault said that if we look at the author not in terms of a person but rather an entity that we can better understand the ideas and vice versa. Below are the four main concepts of Foucault’s “author function”. These four ideas make up the basis for what I understand an author in this context to be and the theory makes me look at authors not as people but as entities.
1. The "author function" is linked to the legal system and arises as a result of the need to punish those responsible for transgressive statements.
2. The "author function" does not affect all texts in the same way. For example, it doesn't seem to affect scientific texts as much as it affects literary texts. If a chemistry teacher is talking about the periodic table, you probably wouldn't stop her and say, "Wait a minute--who's the author of this table?" If I'm talking about a poem, however, you might very well stop me and ask me about its author.
3. The "author function" is more complex than it seems to be. This is one of the most difficult points in the essay, and in thinking about it, you might want to consider what Foucault says about the editorial problem of attribution-- the problem of deciding whether or not a given text should be attributed to a particular author.
This problem may seem rather trivial, since most of the literary texts that we study have already been reliably attributed to an author. Imagine, however, a case in which a scholar discovered a long-forgotten poem whose author was completely unknown. Imagine, furthermore, that the scholar had a hunch that the author of the poem was William Shakespeare. What would the scholar have to do, what rules would she have to observe, what standards would she have to meet, in order to convince everyone else that she was right?
A few years ago, this imaginary situation became a reality, when a scholar named Gary Taylor suddenly announced that he had rediscovered a long-long Shakespeare poem. Many, many people viewed Taylor's announcement with skepticism, and in arguing against Taylor, they did resort (without realizing it, of course) to the "criteria of authenticity" proposed by St. Jerome and listed by Foucault on page 111. They argued, for instance, that the poem wasn't good enough to have been authored by Shakespeare--on the assumption, I gather, that Shakespeare was somehow incapable of sinking below a certain level of literary excellence. It may help to keep this sort of situation in mind, as you try to make sense of this third characteristic of the "author function."
4. The term "author" doesn't refer purely and simply to a real individual. The "author" is much like the "narrator," Foucault suggests, in that he or she can be an "alter ego" for the actual flesh-and-blood "writer."
The second part of the assignment for this week was to find a blog from the internet on the idea of what an author is or what makes an author. I did some research and I think that I found one right from the main page of Dr. Mcguire’s blog. The blog is titled Rough Theory and I think that it provides some good insight on the idea of what an author is. I think that this blog makes some assumptions as to the ideas of what an author is and how it helps to shape our understanding of the “author function” and texts. This blog seems to hint through various posts that the author is more a work of fiction rather than acting as a function from which we can better understand the texts that we come across. I think that the idea of an author as fiction rather than function is equally as compelling as the “author function” that Foucault writes about in the article and that if we were to think about the author as a fictional element then we need to be careful not to bring it into the realm of the real and make it seem like it has a persona. These are just a few of my thoughts on what makes an author and whether or not the author serves as a function of the text or a fictional element of the text. I would like to point out that I find this concept to be very difficult to grasp and that I could and probably am wrong but, these are just a few of my thoughts on the ideas that Foucault presented in the article.