In his important article entitled "What Is an Author?" (1977), Michel Foucault theorizes the relationship between author and text, "the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it" (Foucault 115). This Web page, by contrast, explores the question of who the author is and what presence the author has in the text. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between this topic and Foucault's, "What Is an Author" does raise some important ideas related to authorial identity within the text.

For one, Foucault observes that an author's name performs more than an indicative function: "It is more than a gesture, a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of a description" (Foucault 121). Foucault uses the example of Aristotle: when we refer to his name, we are making a series of associations such as "the author of the Analytics" and/or "the founder of ontology." The word Aristotle invokes an array of descriptions.

Usually, however, these descriptions refer to some aspect of the body of works produced by the author. We rarely invoke the word Aristotle in reference to the author's moods, his family life, his physical description. "Aristotle" may serve as a description, as Foucault claims, but it is a description that, especially within the academy, refers to a body of work rather than to a human being. Foucault would agree, since he asserts the death of the author in terms of the "total effacement of the individual characteristics of the writer; the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing" (Foucault 117).

Indeed, in Foucault's day -- in the 1970s, that is -- this contention may have been true. But in the 1990s, when the proliferation and development of hypertext and other electronic media presents new zones for authors and texts, we do not contend with the same kind of effacement of the author as we did twenty years ago. The problem of individuality being cancelled out by struggles between author and text may persist -- electronic media does not transform all issues of authorship -- but new electronic media pave additional avenues, ones unavailable to print media, in which authorial self-representation can flourish.