A Brief Biography: Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France on October 15, 1926.  He studied in France at the Ecole Normale Superieure and finished fourth on the Bac.  He wasn't a very popular student but he was very smart and excelled at his studies.  He flunked his teaching exame and went on to work on his doctorate.  He had many radical sympathies including a brief stint with communism.  He was at times antisocial and arrogant but never happy.  Part of his unhappiness may have stemmed from his homosexuality, something that was not socially acceptable during his lifetime.  He attempted suicide several times.  He released his first book at age 28 but he hadn't quite figured out where he was coming from.  He finished his doctorate which eventually became Madness and Civilization.  At age 46, he was inducted into the Colege of France (a very prestigious position).  It was also at this time that he made his first trip to San Fransisco and entered the gay world.  Foucault died in 1984 of AIDS.

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My experience with Michel Foucault goes as follows.  As a misguided freshman, I let one of my "friends" convince me to take a course on Existentialism (which is a major branch of German and French philosophy in case you were wondering).  One of the required texts was The History of Sexuality: An Introduction; Volume I.  And I read said book.  And didn't understand most of it.  I still managed to come out of the class smelling like roses (don't ask me how and thank you Professor Allard).  I came back to Foucault the next year with Chaucer under my belt (I don't know why but everything seems just that much simpler after Chaucer) and wrote a research paper about Foucault's discursive power theory and the Wife of Bath.  So I feel a little more privileged, coming into this discussion of literary criticism with someone with which I'm already familiar.

Getting into the meaty part of it:  Foucault can be associated with poststructuralism, New Historicism, cultural studies, and queer theory.  Most of his ideas are based around how institutions of power form identity and thus affect society in general.  In 'What is an Author,' Foucault examines the institutional bases from which writers and critics operate.  He pulls from Roland Barthes' conceptualized "death of the author" (Zak is Roland Barthes I believe) and asks what functions the category of author fulfills within the discourse.  Many analysts of literature feel that the author is the source of the text.  Foucault questions this by asking what if both the author and the text itself are merely effects of the societal constructs surrounding them.  He gives examples of newspapers, posters, and bulletins to show that an author isn't always necessary.  It is only literature that places great emphasis on the author and gives him a place of prestige.

My Foucault Presentation: Bonjour classe. Je m'appelle Michel Foucault [My Name is Michel Foucault].  Je ne suis pas un communist [I am not a communist].  Je ne suis pas un nouveau historien [I am not a New Historicist].  Je ne suis pas un structuralist [I am not a structuralist].  Je ne suis pas un nouveau critique [I am not a New Critic].  Je suis FOUCAULT [I am Foucault].  Please pardon my English.  It is not very good.  I would like to give you a few definitions before I start.  The first is Discourse.  Discourse is not simply speech.  It is all the texts and talking and any relevant written material on one specific topic or subject.  History is discourse.  I am concerned with one type of discourse in my essay "What is an Author?"  Another definition is that of the word ecriture.  Ecriture is french for writing.  In this case, ecriture is a type of discourse characterized by the interplay of signifiers.  Signifiers simply means words.  When I write the word cat, you think of this [draws picture of cat].  This [points to cat picture] is a signified.  Signified means the object or thing or person that the signifier or word refers back to.  Ecriture gets ride of the signified.  It is writing about writing itself.  In Deconstruction, "writing unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind"  Ecriture is "concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears"  The Author is my specific concern for this presentation.  My comrad, Roland Barthes said that the author is dead.  I would like to expand on this by saying that the author is now only a function of dicourse.  My argument specifically refutes the Humanistic argument.  I reject Wordsworth.  A poet is not a man speaking to men.  A poet is a way to categorize certain texts.  A group of texts is categorized under a signifier, often the name of an author.  For example.  When you think of Michel Foucault, you may think of my corps, my physical body but also you think of my works: Les Mots et Les Choses, Histoire de la Sexualite: La Volonte de Savoir, et La Naissance de la Clinique.  The Author becomes a function through cultural construction.  Society picks attributes they find necessary and important to understanding an author.  There are many other functions that an author fulfills.  An author gives a text a level of quality.  When you are looking at a group of works, obviously the ones you see are the works of quality.  You will not see a grocery list in with the poems of TS Eliot.  The author denotes one theory or set of ideas.  My works are concerned only with discourse and power.  The author also denotes one style and the author's work is all set in a certain time frame.  There are no references in certain works to things that did not happen within the time that an author was writing.  I can see how a humanist might refute my argument by saying that the personal pronouns in a text point to a certain person.  However, these pronouns point to the author's second self "whose similarity to the author is never fixed [and] undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book"  In conclusion, I would like to say that we have decentered the author like Nietzsche did with God.  God isn't really dead, he is no longer the center of the Christian universe.  The author is no longer the center of the literary universe.  "Behind all...questions we [now] hear little more than the murmur of indifference: 'What matter who's speaking?'"