Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

deconstructionists would seem not to have moved beyond formalism, but to have developed
formalist reading to an unprecedented pitch of rhetorical and tropological sophistication.
Many objections, naturally, might be made to this recuperative reading of construction in general,
but in so far as the placement of the author is concerned, it is clear that the rhetors of Yale have
made precious little advance upon American formalism. Intention and personality, and the whole
host of epistemological problems they raise have been evaded by critical prescriptions not
themselves noticeably different from those of the intentional fallacy and the personalist heresy.
The absence of the author is taken for granted as though it belongs to the vita ante acta of
contemporary theory. The movement against the author in the France of the 1960s therefore
fulfils very much the same function for American deconstruction as Wimsatt and Beardsley's
formulation of the intentional fallacy did for the New Critics, in that it is taken as a well-established
theoretical donnée which leaves the critic free to pursue entirely textualist readings without regard
or responsibility for what those readings exclude or short-circuit. Derrida, along with Barthes and
Foucault, is evoked as though he has demonstrated and achieved the disengagement of the
author from the text and from the critical field such that it is properly improper to speak of the
author in our day and age. To argue or justify the death of the author is deemed trifling, otiose:
these familiar arguments need no further recitation, it being the task of criticism to proceed in the
imperturbable assurance of authorial disappearance.
Naturally, such an enduring rejection of intention and authorship could not pass by entirely
unchallenged, and yet the few worthy attempts to restore literary intention have been isolated
productions and consequently without significant influence. And when, as in the New Pragmatism
(in its literary rather than linguistic manifestations 40), a more concerted assault has been made
on the theoretical position, the central arguments proposed have shown themselves strangely
complicitous with certain aspects of formalist and textualist thinking. In fact, the pragmatic
intentionalist challenge made by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels adds a new chapter to
critical resistance to the author under the title of authorial return. If followed through to the letter,
their programme for restoring an intention isomorphic with textual meaning would diminish the
author to even more skeletal proportions than the notions of an 'author-function', a 'decentred
subject'. As we have argued earlier, there is no effective difference between identifying the text
with its own meanings or those of its author, whilst that identification takes place in absolutist
terms. The notion of 'author' simply collapses into that of 'text' in the articulation of an
intentionality which, as Knapp and Michaels themselves happily concede, is theoretically
irrelevant, 'methodologically useless', and practically null and void.41 The return to the author
here is thus a return only to intention, and to a concept of intention that has no place within either
the theoretical, critical, or pragmatic enterprises.
So far from forcefully unsettling the tradition of Anglo-American formalism, such a pragmatic
gesture serves as one more way of keeping authorial subjectivity in abeyance. What the New
Critics called 'objective meaning', the postructuralists 'textuality', and Knapp and Michaels'
'intention'—for all their differences in ethos—serve the common purpose of emptying out the
author-problematic. Consequently, from the era of Eliot onwards, the dominant critical
methodology in the Anglo-American tradition has turned away from the problems posed by
authorship, or has turned toward them only occasionally, and only by way of the most drastically
impoverished descriptions. No attempts to consolidate, revise or redefine anti-authorial theory
have been made, nor has any decisive and broadly-based interest been shown in the project of
authorial renewal.
The Ghost In The Machine: Authorial Inscription And The Limits Of Theory
Beneath and behind the continuing theoretical refusals and reductions of authorial subjectivity lies
a model of textual simplicity which seeks to keep 'life' at bay. For the best part of the twentieth
century, criticism has been separated into two domains. On the one side, intrinsic and textualist
readings are pursued with indifference to the author, on the other, biographical and source
studies are undertaken as peripheral (sometimes populist, sometimes narrowly academic)
exercises for those who are interested in narrative reconstructions of an author's life or the
empirical genealogy of his work. The proximity of work and life, the principles of their separation
and interaction are neglected by the representatives of 'work' and 'life' alike. Work and life are
maintained in a strange and supposedly impermeable opposition, particularly by textualist critics
who proceed as though life somehow pollutes the work, as though the bad biographicist practices