emac 2322 What's in a name?

After reading "What Is An Author?" by Michel Foucault I saw his main point to be about what connects an author to their work. He discusses when a person is considered to be an author and then questions whether or not all writing produced by this person is a piece of work. How do you differentiate all of the words written by an author, or someone not labeled as such, from their work versus a personal journal? Both are written by the same person yet they do not merit the same value. Both do have something in common though, they are essentially stripping the author of their uniqueness. Foucault says "Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result...he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing." The role of the author is changing with our culture and moving from the worry of who said what to asking real questions about the actual work itself.

This idea that the author is disappearing is a little confusing for me to understand. Foucault says that the point of writing is to create a place where "the writing subject constantly disappears." What does this mean? Does this tie into the idea of the role of the author changing/disappearing? I like the question he brings up "What is a work?" A simple question yet there is no simple answer. How does someone decide what is or isn't a piece of work or better yet who is an author and who is not?

An example of this could be any work put out my an anonymous author. Without knowing who the author is you don't have to worry about distinguishing the writer from the writing and can focus on the content. Now that I've written this example I'm not sure if it really fits with what Foucault was saying. This reading definitely took a lot of focus to read through but posed some interesting thoughts and questions that I liked.