El autor y sus doppelgängers

Abstract

The paper deals with two understandings of the term “author”: theoretical and biographical. As it will be shown with reference to Roland Barthes’s metaphore “death-of-the-author”, which strongly influenced discussions of the poetics to come, a common belief that both understandings relate to literary oeuvre appears to be false. Barthes’s “death-of-the author” will then be related to Michel Foucault thoughts on disappearing subject. In a literary work, writing represents a space where identity of writer dissolves and, at the same time, that very space enables creation of a new, fictional “I”. This transition to fiction is dealt with in the conclusion, where also illustrated by the work of Fernando Pessoa.