Found a nice little cultural theory essay by Alex Good, called, “The Death of the ‘Author’,” After Roland Barthes 1968 essay of the same title (except in that, ‘author’ wasn’t in quotes). Good talks a bit about Barthes and about how much of a hand editors now have in the final production of books. There are a couple good parts especially:

What this means is that the entertainment product has to be managed every step of the way. These books do not “come out of” a community, they come out of a corporation, and what corporations produce are largely anonymous products. This is BookWorld’s business model, and it has lead to predictable (and uninspiring) results. Why anyone thinks the publishing world should be any different than, say, the recording industry, where the biggest stars and most celebrated “artists” often don’t write or in some cases even perform their own music, is a mystery to me.

…

Seeing as the book industry is now modeling itself so completely after the movie biz, it only makes sense that they borrow movie industry practices for attribution. Disputes over authorship (or who gets a “credit”) should be handled by an independent review board that will look at the drafts and find out what percentage of the text can be attributed to whom. And seeing as the “author” may only be a celebrity image or brand name, the corporation behind the image or brand should receive full credit too.

I imagine the title page of the future looking something like this:

Giant Publishing Press
In Association with XYZ Talent International
Proudly Present
A Novel
Produced by Corporate Publishing, Canada
Edited by Collins, Jones, and Becker
Written by Jane Doe & John Smith
With additional dialogue by Billy Canuck
(Based on an Original Idea by Joseph K.)

That seems eerily likely to come to pass, I think. Anyway, here is a totally different web page by somebody else about the concept of “Death of Author.” It’s pretty short, so I’ll just toss the whole thing in:

Foucault speaks of the death of an author, “a victim of his own writing” (140): Our present culture has transformed writing into a means to obliterate the writer. The idea that an author is killed by his writing stems from the loss in the former’s “individual characteristics” (140) in his text; in a sense said to have lost “his own structure …in the structure of language” (Authors and Writers, 187). The viewing of language as a structure arises from Barthe’s notion of an author who uses language both as a raw material and the product of his work.

Structuralist such as Foucault and Barthes believes that an author can never expressed himself exactly what he means when he uses words as the instruments of expression. That is because structuralists see words as being ambiguous and that words create meanings on their own. They are “structures that operate unconsciously” (Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 120).

And this next one, my friends, is the single-best explanation of the Death of the Author I’ve seen so far (plus the rest of the article is quite good).

In “What Is An Author?” Michel Foucault theorizes about the author as a “function of discourse” that classifies or categorizes written works in particular ways. By this he proposes that the concept of author is one of many ways that we mentally organize the continuous exchange of ideas and information through language. Roland Barthes, in “The Death of the Author,” deconstructs the concept of author by demonstrating that every thought or idea, word or phrase is part of a cultural “text” that took years, decades, or even centuries to develop and will continue far into the future. He states that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” and that to “give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text.” If we put these two ideas together and put them into contemporary terms, then the author, as a conceptual entity, becomes an indexing category for the cataloging or classification of quotations and ideas. The author, as a concrete entity who puts the ideas together, physically constructs the text–by pen or keyboard–and creates an original document, is lost in the theoretical landscape.