Author’s Being and Death: from Ancient Times to Postmodernism

Abstract

The article examines the concepts of “author” and “authorship” in literature in terms of his birth, evolution, decline, and return. The problem of authorship in literary studies is related to the question of approaches to textual research: should we pay attention to the author’s personality, what place does the author occupy in the author-text-reader relationship, and is it possible to completely abandon the author in favour of the reader or the text? The subject of the study is the concept of “author” in literature in the context of the historical development of the phenomenon of authorship. The purpose of the study is an attempt to comprehensively analyse the phenomenon of authorship, its evolution, and to compare different theories and approaches to the study of literary authorship. Anglo-American literary critics (E. Bennett, S. Burke, and J. Frow), considering the issue of authorship, include in their searches the early epochs – Antiquity and the Middle Ages, where there were proto-models of authorship. The figure of the author as an independent creator whose ideas are presented in his literary work wereconsolidated in the Modern period. This was facilitated, in particular, by the invention of printing and copyright. In Romanticism, the concept of “author” is more developed. Here, the author appears as a carrier of original ideas, and the literary work is a real reflection of his thoughts and inspiration. The development of modernism is undergoing dramatic changes. In the twentieth century, representatives of the formal school of literary criticism, the new criticism, determined that a work cannot be explained solely by the author’s personality. Besides, the focus was on the text and later on the reader. The works of R. Barth and M. Foucault reached their apogee without author-centered approach in the 1960s. At the end of the century, literary critics resumed an active discussion about the place of the author, considering the “death of the author” to be too radical. The study uses the historical method to trace the evolution of the phenomenon of authorship, the comparative method to help establish logical connections between different theories, and the method of analysis. In the course of the study, the author identifies the periods of development of authorship and the specific features inherent in each of them. In particular, the author identifies the characteristic features of authorship in the ancient era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. An important element of the work is the establishment of relationships between different theories of authorship in the twentieth century, where there is a struggle with traditional ideas about the author. Based on the research of S. Burke, it is determined that the transition from author to text and reader was carried out gradually during the first half of the twentieth century. The “death of the author” was the result of the work of many literary schools, and R. Barthes summarized it in a rather radical form. The author’s rapid return to the discourse is due to the impossibility of solving the issue of text interpretation by completely ignoring the author, in particular the peculiarities of his individual style. The novelty of the work lies in an attempt to take a global historical view of the problem of authorship, since authorship is more often discussed in the context of the twentieth century. The obtained results will help to better understand the reasons for the decline of the phenomenon of authorship and its revival, as well as to understand the variability of approaches in the study of literary texts.