Writers, Authors and athors

In Barthes’, "The Death of an Author” he talks about two different types of authors. Authors with a capital A and author with a lowercase a. Author means the language or discourse of the writer in the overall view of the text. While “author” refers to a writer implementing the language in the text. The text is called “The Death of an Author” because Barthes implies that an author must die in order for the reader or writer to be born. The literal meaning of death is not implied but rather it symbolizes the fact what must be moved out of the way in order for the text to be focused on something other than the author. Readers are born within the text and their role is meaningless without the text and their interpretation of what the Author or author is trying to say.  So one must ask themselves, who is more important? The author or the Author? And what makes one more important or powerful than the other?

In Ong’s, “The Writer is Always a Fiction” he starts of by saying that a lot of literature and text is dedicated to discussing the relationship between oral and written and oral verbalization but not much is ever focused on the audience. Now what does he mean by audience? According to Ong the relationship of audience to writing is the “situation inscribes communication established and to the roles that the readers as readers are consequently called on to play”. Just as Barthe gives importance to the Authot or author, Ong gives importance to the audience implying that they are an important part of the overall reading and writing experience. He touches on the difference of location of an audience depending if you are speaker or a writer. A speaker places the audience before him. But the writer has a space between him and the audience whether it is in time or space.

Part two of Ong’s “The Writer is Always a Fiction” clearly summarizes the main point of the text saying that:

“These reflections suggest, or are meant to suggest,that there exists a tradition in fictionalizing audiences that is a component part of literary tradition in the sense in which literary tradition is discussed in T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." A history of the ways audiences have been called on to fictionalize themselves would be a correlative of the history of literary genres”