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Joanna Neilly, Sandra Mayer, The Author in the Popular Imagination: Views from the Nineteenth Century, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2018, Pages 273–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqy022
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Extract
Authors’ names bear the weight of their achievements, but also of their varied reception histories and the expectations of the public. In prominent cases of authorial fame, the name of the author precedes acquaintance with the work. Dieter Borchmeyer claims, for example, that Goethe’s place in the canon not just of German but of world literature is assured because of what his name stands for overall, rather than because of any particular literary achievement.1 The act of condensing the totality of a writer’s life, works, impact and reception into the handy cipher of a single name is characteristic of the ‘author function’, a term via which Michel Foucault reveals the complexities and tensions that disrupt efforts to neatly summarize and contain a literary life. As a function, the authorial name ‘does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects’.2 Moreover, the author’s name has more to do with effect than with origin; it ‘does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it’, but rather ‘manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture’.3 Rendering irrelevant the function of the proper name as a form of address, the author’s name is recreated independently of its bearer, who ultimately has little control over how it is understood.
