Literature and Salvation in Elizabeth Costello Or How to Refuse to be an Author in Eight or Nine Lessons

Abstract

What is an author? “The function of an author,” Michel Foucault famously
pronounced in 1969, “is to characterize the existence, circulation, and
operation of certain discourses within a society” (124). Foucault provides a
template for inquiry into a certain period of literature, the age of the
idealistic author.2 To understand that period, and whether or not we have
moved on from it, we need to determine what social forms and institutions
were necessary for the author-function to operate.

English in Africa Vol. 34 (1) 2007: pp. 79-95