More Foucault

"Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer of to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in the division and this distance" (Foucault, Rabinow 112)

"the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author - or, rather, constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discourses - is directly derived form the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the text at it disposal..." (110 Foucault then explains St. Jerome's method for determining authorship and creating subjectivity)