The Foucault’s Chiasmus Revisited: Authorship between Science and Literature (XIVth- XVIIIth Centuries)

Roger Chartier is a leading historian of post-medieval book culture. He has written the only comprehensive account of the national history of the book, Histoire de l'édition française.

In this lecture, Chartier revisits Foucault's essay, expanding and complicating its analysis of the "author function" to take into account the modes of textual production. Chartier also challenges the belief that the shift in the self-fashioning of the "author" is causally linked to the advent of print, arguing that the unity of the "author" is dependent on the material unity of the text itself and that authorship is not only a function of particular kinds of discourse, but also a function of the materiality of the text.