Abstract

The apocalyptic annunciation about authorship in the post structuralist studies has brought an entirely different perspective to the conception of originality or creativity. Before, we could not think of the author except by invoking simultaneously his specific gift of imagin-ation. Now the new perspective no longer considers the author as an imaginative but as an imaginary or make-believe individual. The author is incapable of imagining freely and independently; his name and function are merely imposed or prefabricated by systemized structures, like discourse, institution, language, and so on. Given the situation, we often find little consensus about what precisely might constitute authorship, even less about what imagination or originality comprises. In this essay , I will study the rapport and interplay between the self and the signifier or language from the post-structuralists' viewpoints, with a special emphasis on Roland Barthes', and then examine the gap or discrepancy between their critiques about the nature of authorship and the results of their practical criticism.

Much of this study shows that the notion of the game, with its demand for utmost seriousness without an ultimate metaphysical foundation and with its shifting of rules from epoch to epoch, best explains the dialectical place of the author in our present discursive practices. Paradoxically speaking, a so-called authentic or true author should be free from the game, but the author can not be recognized as an author unless he sets himself into the game itself. Its nature of the game makes us wonder whether we should be ready for another shift or transformation which proclaims that there is no other, but only the self , in spite of the fact that the conception of authorship at the present moment hails an other by negating the self. At any rate, it is in the endless comings of the apocalyptic annunciation of end that postmodern authorship has been embedded and has parodied itself, inasmuch as the apocalyptic annunciation always entails or welcomes another end or beginning.

Keywords: authorship, text, signifier, originality, game.