“What does it matter who is speaking?”: Literature and the idea of Authorship

Abstract

“What does it matter who is speaking?” someone said, “What does it matter who is speaking?,”
– writes Foucault, quoting Samuel Beckett, in his essay ‘What is an Author?’ (215). Foucault’s
essay raises a question that is not new in any sense but is extremely important, especially since
it is part of a larger discourse situated around the idea of authorship in literature. Not long
before this essay came out, another French theorist, Roland Barthes had famously announced
the death of the author. In his essay ‘The Death of the Author’ Barthes defines a literary text as
‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’. (Barthes 187) He
markedly eliminates any mention of an ‘author’ in his definition of a literary text. What Barthes
does in his essay is assert that a literary text is absolutely free of the possibility of being unified
or limited under any notion of the author’s intention. I