The Mind of the Maker and the Death of the Author

I. Introduction

In a world that increasingly emphasizes function over creation, the arts—which were once deeply valued as mirrors of humanity and its relationship to the divine—are now burdened with utilitarian roles in society, effectively erasing the voices of their creators. Architecture, design, literature, and other artistic disciplines have undergone a drastic shift with the postmodern movement, where a work of art is no longer a means of expression of the creator’s soul and is now merely a product of function shaped by and for those consuming it. The work is no longer an end in itself, but must serve a means in a culture bent on productivity and progress for the sake of progress. As a result, society has lost its sense of leisure, curiosity, and what is (1) and traded it for a sense of comfort, certainty, and control. At the heart of this shift in priorities lies a formative question: What is the role of a creator when a work’s meaning is no longer tied to his experience and intent, but is instead defined by its interpretation and use?

Postmodernism concludes that there is no room for the author’s soul in their works, and that the author himself must die if the reader is to learn anything from his literature. Though there are traces of it in numerous literary theories following the Romantic age, this concept of “The Death of the Author” was formally introduced by French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes in an essay of the same name. In it, he argues for the displacement of the very notion of the author in favor of the reader’s autonomy. He claims, “We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (2) Barthes posits that it is only when the author enters his own death that writing truly begins. This idea reflects the postmodern shift away from the author’s intent and toward a reader-centric approach to interpretation and meaning. The goal of the movement is to separate a work’s potential power and effect from the agenda, experiences, and biases of a singular person, theological meaning, or instance in time, and release it to be “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (3) This view aims to level the playing field between writer and reader, between culture’s past and future, but in the process, eliminates vital constructs within the work’s figurative DNA.

In his 1969 essay, “What is an Author?,” Michael Foucault supports and expands on Barthes’s view. He states, “Writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind.” (4) By exhuming and unraveling the “game” of writing through a postmodern lens, Foucault deconstructs the author and strips him of any inherent meaning or intention, rendering those parts of him unnecessary to the work. What is left behind is merely a social construct or functional figure whose essentiality does not reside in his experience, his voice, or his soul; rather in his function of discourse within the work and the greater institution of literature and society.

While Barthes and Foucault strip the author of all interpretive authority, Dorothy L. Sayers argues that the author is integral to both the creation and interpretation of art. Her book, The Mind of the Maker, provides a theological framework through which to view the creative mind and unearth the deeply woven connections between man and his Creator. The work of the imagination, according to Sayers, is not merely a gift from God, but an inseparable part of Christian doctrine and human existence. This not only supports, but requires the author to play a central role in shaping the meaning of any literary work. According to Sayers, the creative Power of a work is only actualized when the creative Idea within a maker’s mind meets the creative Energy, which incarnates the Idea into the work itself, and gives it its ultimate Power. Contrary to the postmodern rejection and discard of the author, Sayers’s thesis affirms that the author is central to both a work’s existence and its meaning, and her Trinitarian model of creation demonstrates the artist’s intent is inseparable from the work itself.

II. The Mind of the Maker in a postmodern context of authorship

The concept of authorship has undergone an evolution throughout history, from the Classical belief that the author is an inspired creator, skilled craftsman, and a revered teacher of moral truth, to the authoritative and philosophical role of the author in the Renaissance, to the Romantic belief that the author is a visionary and unique genius. As the modernist and postmodernist worldviews became more prevalent and sought to dismantle these notions, the author’s role was starved and withered until the author himself held no authority within the work and all authority was handed to the reader; with the work’s meaning at the mercy of his interpretation.

In the twentieth century, positioned in the heat of the shift, is The Mind of the Maker. In her book, Sayers defies the postmodern trajectory with her stance on authorship, which serves as an effort to reclaim some of the Classical views and provides a theoretical parallel between the creative imagination and the Trinitarian God. In The Mind of the Maker, she quotes her previously published play, The Zeal of Thy House, which summarizes the entirety of the construct:

For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father. Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word. Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work, and its response in the lively soul” and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit. And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other: and this is the image of the Trinity. (5)

Her analogy of the Trinity asserts that the author’s intent, act, and influence are the three “persons” within one “essence”—interconnected, interdependent, and inseparable—offering a theological rebuttal to the secular fragmentation of authorship. However, while it is a reasonable and congruent view for the Christian to adopt, there are important distinctions in belief and reason that must be accounted for before placing Sayers toe-to-toe with postmodernists like Barthes and Foucault.

Sayers’s conclusion in The Mind of the Maker assumes a few key tenets. First, that there is a difference between moral code, which “depends for its validity upon a consensus of human opinion about what man’s nature really is, and what it ought to be, when freed from this mysterious self-contradiction and enabled to run true to itself,” (6) and moral law, which is objective and “does not depend upon human consent or opinion.” (7) This works directly against the reader-response view that Barthes and Foucault represent, as their approach implies that without holding any inherent value, the author must consent to the reader’s interpretation. The distinction of moral law also implies a source which dictates the law. The apologetic argument for a moral law-giver is not the focus of this essay, but is nonetheless, an important consideration. The second tenet is that moral law is at the foundation of moral code, and suggests that “because God has made the world like this and will not alter it, therefore you must not worship your own fantasies, but pay allegiance to the truth.” (8) To Sayers, the author has a responsibility to seek and present the truth, which requires a surrender to the objective moral law that exists outside of the author, reader, or text itself.

Barthes and other postmodern thinkers, alternatively, argue that the truth exists within the discourse between the reader and the content. There is little to no acknowledgement of objective truth or an objective truth source. In his essay, “Performative Utterance, the Word of God, and the Death of the Author,” Michael Hancher suggests, “Barthes’s burial of the Author recalls Nietzsche's funeral for God ("Gott ist tot"). And the connection is close; for the Author, made in the image of God, could not survive without Him; furthermore, to deny the Author is a way of denying God.” (9) Barthes’s proposition reflects a cultural de-emphasis of not only the author, but also of what he represents—religious influence on the truth. He suggests, “...writing is the destruction of every voice, of every paint of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” (10) Across disciplines, this push for neutrality results in flat, non-dynamic significance in what used to be an artist’s point of connection with his audience—a shared belief, transcending medium and connecting soul to soul, and soul to the divine. In his essay, “The Philosophical Mea Culpa of the Icons of the Death of the Author,” Nysret Krasniqi explains how this down-shift plays out according to Barthes’s thesis:

This finding, as it is seen, projects a future, then a denial of a myth and the Death of the Author (author with a capital A) in favour of the birth of the reader. In our observation, the future meant the utopian novelty, even as an ideological reformation, the overthrow of myth, implied the challenge to the author’s religious affiliation, while the Death of the Author meant denying the author as a writing intention and as an influence intent in the literary study. Meanwhile, the birth of the reader was projected as a game in literary linguistic discourse, moreover, as the utopia of replacing the historical role of the author of literature. (11)

The postmodern emphasis on society and the individual naturally leads to a smaller and smaller scope through which the truth can be accessed. If the postmodern reader is to accomplish his mission of interpretation, he must, therefore, not be influenced by the intent of the author.

Foucault’s position aligns with Barthes’s shift away from authorial intent and toward reader interpretation, but he takes it even further by emphasizing the author as a function rather than a sovereign figure that determines a work’s meaning. While Barthes de-centers the author, Foucault dismantles him completely. He says, “Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.” (12) Essentially distilling the author’s intent down to core operational elements, Foucault asks readers and literary critics to consider how a work of literature functions apart from an author’s intent, placing it within the context of larger discourse instead. This reader-centered view of interpretation leads to the text’s meaning being shaped by its interactions within society, culture, and language rather than being influenced and guided by the author.

While Barthes and Foucault each provide valuable critiques of views of authorship similar to Sayers’s, their solutions offer a skewed balance between author, text, and reader, leaning heavily into relativism and ethical ambiguity at best, and nihilism at worst. Their emphasis on the reader’s interpretation encourages critical thinking and a healthy responsibility as a reader, but the complete divorce from the author’s intent takes this idea too far—stripping a work of its initial moral vision and paving the path for the irresponsible possibility of countless interpretations. Additionally, the reduction of the author to merely a function or construct flattens any emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance that helps shape a work of literature from the point of conception—what Aristotle would call the philosophical and higher nature of poetry [versus history]. (13) Barthes and Foucault also minimize the historical and biographical context of a work, which creates the opportunity for wild misinterpretations, as a work that was created in response to a historical or personal event cannot and should not be assessed apart from the one who experienced it.

To compare Sayers’s approach with Barthes and Foucault, this essay will examine three key themes: First, authorial identity—the life of the author as laid out in The Mind of the Maker versus Barthes’s “Death of the Author” concept; Second, free will, providence, and the reader’s role in interpretation; and third, Sayers’s Trinitatian model versus Foucault’s author-function model. These three themes will illuminate the crossroads between the writers’ views and expose who the author truly is, his role to live or die, and his impact, beginning with his life in light of his postmodern death.

III. Authorial identity: a force of life or death?

Sayers’s model has three pillars—Idea, Energy, and Power—and the author is concerned with all three, as “these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a written and printed book. These things are not confined to the material manifestation: they exist in—they are—the creative mind itself.” (14) For Sayers, the author’s personhood—the very life within him—is inseparable from his ability to create, and subsequently, from his creation. This contrasts the postmodern view, which would suggest that the author is only concerned with the first two aspects of Sayers’s model: as subject to the Idea (the reason for writing) and function of the Energy (the act of writing). The Power, according to postmodernists, exists—and should remain—distinct and removed from the author.

One issue with this postmodern position is that it assumes the work operates within the same confines as the author himself: within a linear concept of time and a three-dimensional concept of space. In regard to time, Barthes argues:

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as “the past of his own book”: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modem scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now. (15)

It is the moment of writing where the author dies, along with everything in his experience, preconceived notions, and philosophies that pushed the book from idea into text, the modern scriptor is born, with nothing except the words themselves to dictate not only the meaning of the work, but the very meaning of him.

Sayers’s framework, alternatively, suggests the work has always existed in the here and now, regardless of the author’s place in time and in relation to the work’s time. Since the work is a reflection of a divine Creator, it originates from the same eternal origin in both time and space, and “does not precede any mental or physical work upon the materials or on the course of the story within a time-series.” (16) This placement of the work outside of the author himself allows him to act as a vehicle of objective truth, which contrasts Barthes’s skepticism toward objective meaning. She says, “But the end is clearly there in the beginning…The Idea was from the beginning in every corner of the universe which it contains, and eternally begets its manifestations. There is never any point in time that can conclude or comprehend the Idea.” (17) The creative Idea, in this case, produces inherent meaning that exists independently of any reader’s interpretation. In this relationship she has laid out, it is not creation’s relationship with itself that provides the meaning, as the postmodern view would insinuate, but rather, it is the relationship between the Father/Idea and man/author which contains its inherent meaning. According to Sayers, “The Idea of the book is a thing-in-itself quite apart from its awareness or its manifestation in Energy, though it still remains true that it cannot be known as a thing-in-itself except as the Energy reveals it. The Idea is thus timeless and without parts or passions, though it is never seen, either by writer or reader, except in terms of time, parts and passion.” (18)

Barthes’s position also raises questions about where the author should be, if not central to the meaning of a work. If he is to remain separate and distinct, then his Idea or intention essentially vanishes once the work has come to fruition. Barthes argues, “No one, no 'person', says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.” (19) By entering into the death of the person who existed before the text, and seeing his birth and life as exclusively yoked to and dictated by the text, the author, according to Barthes, opens the work up to its true end of interpretation. For him, it is the reader who creates meaning, as the text’s significance only surfaces once a reader has interacted with it in his own cultural and experiential context. To oversimplify, one might suggest Barthes believes that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not, in fact, make any sound.

However, it could easily be argued that interpreting Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost from the reader’s neutral, oblique perspective, without paying the proper attention to the author’s theological and moral intentions, would lead to a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the text. Without the author’s intent, Paradiso may be interpreted as nothing more than a guided journey through the cosmos, rather than a deeply theological and spiritual allegory that explores robust themes of true enjoyment, freedom, and objective truth—all dependent on the author’s understanding of such philosophies, and expounded on by the reader’s understanding of both concept and author. It is the author, not the reader, who serves as a guide from the work’s innermost being to its external significance.

That is not to say that Sayers discounts the value of the reader in interpretation, which will be discussed in more detail later. In fact, she claims that old metaphors “are still ‘living’ metaphors so long as we use them to interpret direct experience. Metaphors become dead only when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life.” (20) The reader’s experience and interpretation remain vital in making connections between past and present, which is necessary for a holistic picture of humanity. Sayers merely cautions against the belief that “once an invention has been brought into being and made public by a creative act, the whole level of human understanding is raised to the level of that inventiveness.” (21) Discounting the author’s own study, skill, and experience and claiming its fruit for all of humanity suggests that every human, simply by reading, elevates himself to that author’s insight, skill, and experience, which is not inherently the case. The reader can certainly apply his own experience to what he reads, but it does not replace the author’s original intent.

IV. Free will, providence, and the reader’s role in interpretation

So then, what is the reader’s role, if not to wholly interpret the text apart from the author’s intent? In The Mind of the Maker, the reader plays an active, but not absolute role in the life and meaning of the work. His response may animate the text in the current space and time of his reading, but his response also remains within the bounds established by the author’s Idea and Energy. According to Sayers, the Power is “the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them. In fact, from the reader’s perspective, it is the book. By it, they perceive the book, both as a process in time and as an eternal whole, and react to it dynamically.” (22) In theological terms, it could be said that just as the Holy Spirit works to fulfill what is set out by the Father and the Son, the “reader” completes the creative process by engaging with the text freely, through his own will and interpretation—all without nullifying the author’s intent and without unlimited freedom to impose arbitrary meaning.

This surrender to a work’s prior established structure and purpose poses an issue for Barthes. He argues that the reader is the sole determiner of meaning, and therefore needs full autonomy in interpreting a text. He states, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (23) Removing the author, according to Barthes, frees the text to its rightly fluid meaning, shaped entirely by the reader’s cultural and personal context, as “...a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (24) Barthes’s reader not only needs permission to exercise his free will, but full support and affirmation of where that will lead. His position reflects the general, inherent distrust within the postmodern view of authorship—that the only mind which can be trusted is one’s own, and that the source of any truth must be deconstructed in order to “reveal its inner contradictions and aporias…” (25) Barthes claims, “...linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors.” (26) The problem with this deconstruction, however, is:

If the nature of language is such that meaningful proclamation is impossible—or that its (moral and spiritual) center is subject to deconstructive interrogation, which amounts to the same thing, since the point of the Christian kerygma is that it is unconditionally and unprovisionally binding—then it doesn't matter what our moral imperatives are. If language can't carry the load, it can't carry the load, no matter how much good it would do us if it were so capable. (27)

The deconstruction of any moral or spiritual significance within a work renders any interpretation of the same significance from the reader’s perspective futile.

The alternative requires a balance between freedom and structure, leaving room for both the author to create a work with inherent meaning while setting boundaries for interpretation, as well as for the reader to interpret the work freely within those bounds. Sayers offers an example that suggests, “While the parent is wholly responsible for calling the children into being, and can exercise a partial control over their minds and actions, he cannot but recognize the essential independence of the entity that he has procreated. The child’s will is perfectly free…” (28) Her idea here is a direct reflection of mankind’s relationship to its Creator, who has bestowed free will on man to engage with His creation out of love and respect for His part in it. Through this lens, Barthes’s model of unlimited interpretation creates dangerous potential for the reader to warp and mutilate the text’s meaning beyond recognition, making the work itself a god over man’s ability and agency to create it.

Together, the free will to interpret and engage with a work is balanced by providence that exists within the author’s given structure and meaning. From here, the reader can align or deviate, much like the child from his parent. However, he cannot disregard it completely, as it is the given foundation from which he makes his decision. While Barthes argues that the modern scriptor’s hand “has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins,” (29) Sayers suggests, “When a writer’s Idea is revealed or incarnate by his Energy, then, and only then, can his Power work on the world…The habit, very prevalent today, of dismissing words as ‘just words’ takes no account of their power. But once the Idea has entered into other minds, it will tend to reincarnate itself there with ever-increasing Energy and ever-increasing Power.” (30) Does a reader agree with the anti-totalitarian themes within George Orwell’s 1984? The only way to measure his interpretation is against the author’s provided intent and structure—in this case, measure his agreement and its bases. And while the concept of providence is not always a black-and-white, binary interpretive decision of “agree” or “disagree,” the reader cannot wholly disregard the author’s provisions and still find himself in an interpretive place that is relevant to the work—since it encompasses the author’s Idea and Energy.

What, then, are the author’s duties and limitations in guiding the reader’s interpretation? Sayers suggests that the author’s role is to help shape the work’s moral and thematic direction, stopping short of expecting or extracting specific interpretations or reactions from the reader. Rather than Barthes’s complete dismissal of the author, this offers a balance between creative intent and reader agency, which in turn, produces the necessary tension in which productive discourse can take place. It balances Barthes’s proposed need to recognize that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God),” (31) while still giving the author the respect and conversational due he is owed.

V. Trinitarian model vs. Author-function model

If free will and providence determine the correct balance of roles between the author and the reader, the model of creativity determines the correct balance of roles between the author and the text itself. Sayers presents a Trinitarian model of creativity, while Michael Foucault defends what he calls the ‘author-function’ model. Sayers’s Trinitarian model of creativity is, again, an embodiment of the creative Idea—serving as the timeless source of the work, or God the Father—the creative Energy—the incarnated Idea put to form, or God the Son—and the creative Power—the way the Idea and Energy of the work move and interact with humanity, or God the Spirit. Unlike Barthes’s and Foucault’s death and deconstruction of the author concepts (or the Idea, in this case), Sayers’s Trinitarian concept depends on the interconnectedness of the three. They do not work if not all present and engaged in the work prior, during, and after its conception and completion. The author specifically, or Idea, is both the originator and sustainer of the work’s meaning.

Foucault, alternatively, sees the author not as an originator or a visionary, but as a construct within literature that is one of many that collectively contributes to its meaning, and is as equally measured as any other. According to this view, since literature is made up of nothing but equally weighted constructs, they each are defined only by their role or function—the author as a tool for organizing a text within broader discourse and according to cultural, legal, and institutional forces. This ‘author-function’ model maintains great separation between the author’s intention from his purpose in the work. Foucault’s ‘author-function’ model is broken down into four main characteristics:

[1] The 'author-function' is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; [2] it does not operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; [3] it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; [4] it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy. (32)

Given this structure and these qualifications, the meaning of the work sits on the side of the text, rather than the one who penned it, because the author’s function is characterized by a “plurality of egos” (33) that represent a “second self whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book.” (34) However, by decentralizing anything and everything that contributes to a work’s meaning, particularly the foundational role of the author’s intent, the model fragments and distorts the creative process—inflating certain elements beyond their means and deflating others that deserve greater emphasis. In her essay, “What Was an Author?,” Molly Nesbit explores the flaws in Foucault’s reasoning. She says, “[T]he economy is Foucault's blind spot. His author had to exist in a disembodied, non-reflecting, dispersed state, in knowledge, not in the world. This led him to posit an author disconnected from the procedures of everyday life, something which experience tells us is simply not true. Authors function, whether the state of knowledge recognizes their existence or not.” (35) Unlike Sayers’s model, which allows the author to be a conduit of coherence and foundation from which the work can build its meaning, Foucault’s approach of disconnection ends up unraveling and destabilizing the work in its entirety.

This issue of postmodern fragmentation—evident in both Barthes’s and Foucault’s theses—is the resulting dissemination of meaning across cultural, social, and reader interpretations. The postmodern discomfort with themes that transcend time and cultures, and the absence of a unifying force of intent and purpose, together create an environment primed for misinterpretation and misplaced authority in those misinterpretations. To create a literary landscape in which a reader’s interpretation cannot be questioned essentially gives readers permission to make the work whatever they desire, regardless of the impact their interpretation might have on future readers or scholarship. Sayers’s push for unity and Barthes’s and Foucault’s push for fragmentation produces more than a difference in view, but a philosophical tension. The framework Sayers provides offers a compelling argument for coherence, not as a limitation on the work, but a reflection of its divinity. The Trinitarian model shows that unity within creation leads to more creation, whereas fragmentation leads to a loss of depth and meaning for the sake of leveling the playing field. While Barthes, again, argues that “...a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” (36) Sayers believes, “...the artist does not see life as a problem to be solved, but as a medium for creation. He is asked to settle the common man’s affairs for him; but he is well aware that creation settles nothing. The thing that is settled is finished and dead, and his concern is not with death but with life.” (37)

VI. Conclusion

In a postmodern society that reaches for individual identity, independence, and meaning through separation and fragmentation from “the whole,” it is the undercurrent of unity, combined with authorial providence, the reader’s free will, and fellowship between both entities that collectively pave the way for true meaning within literature. Postmodernist thinking grasps to fill in the corners of the map, solve (or invalidate) the unknown, and become self-sustaining in all areas of life, philosophy, and relationship. In this spirit, theories like Barthes’s and Foucault’s aim to reconcile the death of the author with the death of God. After all, giving weight to a deity or to the author is maintaining connection to the whole. However, their attempt to reason away the need for a theological element of understanding exposes the gaps in their framework, which, ironically, only theology can fill.

The Mind of the Maker offers a more holistic and powerful framework through which to view creative work and its impact—codified by a theological lens. Unlike her postmodern counterparts, whose search for certainty leads to the death of not only the author, but ultimately of creativity, the implications of Sayers’s insights reach beyond literature. They raise important theoretical questions and highlight a need to rethink contemporary debates about meaning and interpretation within the artistic process, ever continuing the conversation of creation, and courageously surrendering to the mystery that gains nothing from the author’s death, but comes alive through the mind of the maker.

James V. Schall, The Life of the Mind (Washington, D.C.: ISI Books, 2012), 4.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 148.
Ibid., 146.
Michael Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 300.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987), 37-38.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 12.
Michael Hancher, “Performative Utterance, the Word of God, and the Death of the Author,” Semeia 41 (1988): 31, https://research.ebsco.com/c/z52fn5/viewer/pdf/uegb3o3agz.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 142.
Nysret Krasniqi, “The Philosophical Mea Culpa of the Icons of the Death of the Author,” Problemos 95 (2019): 105–116, https://doi.org/10.15388/Problemos.95.9.
Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 301.
Aristotle, Poetics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997), 17.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 41.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 38.
Ibid., 208.
Ibid., 39-40.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 45.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 41.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 147.
Ibid., 148.
Alan Jacobs, “Deconstruction” in Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal, Ed. Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 186.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 145.
Jacobs, “Deconstruction,” 191-192.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 63.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 111.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146.
Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 309.
Ibid., 308.
Ibid.
Molly Nesbit. “What Was an Author?,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 240, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930205.
Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148.
Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 188.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Poetics. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. 1997.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text. Edited by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.

Foucault, Michael. “What is an Author?,” in Smith, Steven B. Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

Michael Hancher, “Performative Utterance, the Word of God, and the Death of the Author,” Semeia, 41. 1988. Accessed November 28, 2024.https://research.ebsco.com/c/z52fn5/viewer/pdf/uegb3o3agz.

Jacobs, Alan. "Psychological Criticism: From the Imagination to Freud and Beyond." In Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal. Edited by Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

Krasniqi, Nysret. “The Philosophical Mea Culpa of the Icons of the Death of the Author.” Problemos, 95. 2019. Accessed November 15, 2024. https://doi.org/10.15388/Problemos.95.9.

Nesbit, Molly. “What Was an Author?” Yale French Studies, no. 73. 1987. Accessed November 20, 2024. https://doi.org/10.2307/2930205.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987.

Schall, James V. The Life of the Mind. Washington, D.C.: ISI Books, 2012.

Sunday Morning Misfit