Author's Presence in a Text

           Though Roland Barthes has already declared that the author is "dead" in a text, there are many theories that believe authorship cannot be separated from any writing. Despite many theoretical attacks on presence of the author in a literary creation in the modern era, many other theories believe that author cannot help representing him/herself in his/her writing; thus any writing is expression of its author and his/her feelings, emotions, thoughts and ideas. These theories can be collectively called "the theory of expressivity". Since these theories originate and develop most in Romantic writings, they can also be called "the Romantic theory of authorship" or "the Romantic-expressive theory".

            Obviously language cannot stand independently; it operates in writing as a means to express or represent some other ideas, thoughts or feelings. Without those hidden behind it, language cannot be meaningful. And, those ideas and thoughts originate nowhere in the outside world, but in human minds. One writes whatever originates in own mind. Thus, literature is essentially an expression of its author's mind, "the authorship". This is what the critic MH Abrams found in his observation of the eighteenth century literature that "the work of literature is no longer conceived as simply the representation of nature: instead what is presented is as much the view of poet's own interior, his or her mind of heart".  Since Abrams's conception has got intellectual support from philosopher Immanuel Kant and Romantic poets including PB Shelley; it has remained as an influential theory for literary criticism.

Presence of the author can be seen more clearly in writings about confession where the author writes imagining no any audience in front of him/her but him/herself. And this absence of audience automatically allows and activates presence of the author. For John Stuart Mill, a British philosopher, this is what separates 'poetry' (in larger sense, literature) from 'eloquence': poetry doesn't suppose any audience thus is "overheard" (not "heard" like an eloquence). Poetry is confession of self to self, thus the self is always present. 

            For Romantic-expressive theory, author is present in a text because s/he is the one to get inspired to imagine and to compose the text. And, what inspires him/her to writing is also his/her own interior (i.e. thoughts and feelings). There lie many contradictions in writings of Romantic poets PB Shelley, William Wordsworth and ST Coleridge about sources of imagination, qualities of spontaneity and immediacy and role of author's will in imagination and composition. But they all agree that the author has an important role in inspiration for, imagination and composition of any literary text. Thus, the author is always actively present in his/her literature and one cannot ignore the authorship while interpreting literatures.