Foucault's Author Function Explained

The author function is a literary theoretical concept developed by French thinker Michel Foucault in his essay "What is an author?" from 1969, in which it is a central thesis that the "author" is a discursive quantity rather than a "real" author. For Foucault, this means that in today's culture, only certain texts carry an "authorial function." Thus we will connect a literary work (eg a novel ) with its author, but we will not think in the same way about a basic book in medical science. Foucault believes that the idea of ​​the "author" has an important - but limiting - function in relation to our understanding of a text. Foucault writes that literary criticism's attempts to study multiple texts as a whole are based on a "principle of a particular unity in scripture" that neutralizes, which can unfold in a series of texts. "