James Joyce
if i tell you that this was written by james joyce when he was 10, before his "portrait of an artist as a young man" days,
how does it affect yr reading of the text ?
will you see it as a prefigure of great genius ?
or as an e.g. of how he became a much better writer?

Authors Work
OK . So you are firmly insistent that I am the author
traditional methods of attributing authorship ,as stated in Foucault's What is an author? suggest four major criteria for telling what is an author's work
1) consistent style
2) consistent ideology/doctrine
3)author as a historical figure around which the writings revolve( meaning works have to be written when author is alive).
4) same standard of writing
All right. Say you know "me" personally as a religious freak. I have never expressed any faith in existentialism or doubts. So am I the author of this short piece replete with existentialist fear? And swearing? would this be consistent with my "doctrine" ? Or to explain it further how about T.S. Eliot ? Is he the author of works such as The Wasteland, Old Possum's Book of Practical cats and Choruses from the rock ? Without the historical background, style and ideology is sufficiently different to cast doubt. So is using an author's individuality to define a work and gauge its merit a good method? Or even using the premise of the unity or the longing for unity within the writer? What if Eliot, like the Steppenwolf had many selves ? To see the unity despite the chaos created by divergent texts he wrote throughout his career based on his supposed unity would then be a fallacy.

Kundera
is the true author Milan Kundera? I stole his method of making philosophical and psychological generalizations. If in the sciences, we have Newton's law of gravity, which is strangely bizarrely seen as Newton's property in some way , then is not my short paragraph Kundera's ? He made it possible for me to write this way. He authored this method of writing. But they are thoughts which are derived from this entity called Pei-Lin. Whose then is this ? His or mine ? Or no one's ? Can writing/ ideas be owned ?

Dostoevsky
then again, although Freud has been acknowledged as the initiator of discourse, Freud always claimed he got his ideas from Dostoevsky While Freud articulated his ideas more blatantly and thus got the credit for psychoanalysis, yet without Dostoevsky, there would be no Freud. So who is the author then of psychanalysis ? Does it matter ? Furthermore no Dostoevsky, there will be no religious existentialist angst in the dream. So must works be written during Dostoevsky's lifetime ? Can he not be the author of my work ? So is author function important ?

Multiple egos as mentioned by Foucault.
Is the PeiLin in the short 'story' the same person as the author Pei-Lin ?

What is my name ?
Pei-Lin. Do you know that there are tons of Pei-Lins out there ? So if you believe that there is such thing as an author what happens when you say Pei-Lin ? OR Joyce for that matter ? are you calling out to the individual who is called Pei-Lin or are you referring the school of thought/type of works I have written .And in Joyce's case are you referring to him as an individual, or to others of the same moniker or to the modernist
writer ? Then again, what if the the writer of Joyce's fiction was actually George Herbert ?

If it is George Herbert, then how would you see the works formerly adduced to Joyce and even Herbert's works? Earlier on, Herbert signified religious poetry that was orthodox and taut, tightly structured. Now that you know he wrote Joyce's works ? Does this change the way you see Herbert's poetry and Ulysses or Finnegans Wake? Was it not in earlier times, that Herbert's name was the touchstone for you to differentiate that sort/style of religious poetry from other texts such the more erotic works of Donne ( again, Donne's name here is used to signify a cluster of works supposedly similar either thematically or stylistically)

Initiators of discourse.
According to Foucault.Freud was an initiator of discourse. Good. So it's obvious to anyone that my writing possessed several Freudian elements.
Dreams as the place where we work out anxieties such as losing control

So now enters Freud. Then is Milan Kundera truly the author of books like the Unbearable Lightness of Being ?
Sex is obviously important in that novel. And sex, fortunately or no, is inextricably linked to Freud. So should half the credit go to the Freud ?

Who am I?
O you think it's me.
So who am I ? as the author ?
does it matter if you know i am an undergraduate doing english literature ?
and that i am living in a post-joyce period ?
How will you evaluate the work then ?
as that from a literary hack ?
are you not then dominated by the idea of the sovereignty of the author ?

other questions:
indeed now that you know "I" wrote this piece, then am i really the author of this work ?
I have merely applied joycean methods of stream of consciousness and focus on banality.
furthermore did i really create this piece ?
has joyce like Freud in a way, initiated a level of discourse in the literary world ?


Mortality and immortality.
Will this work survive me and in some way extend my immortality ?
Or then again, has it effaced me as a personality ?
IS this why "I" (character) am so anxious in the airplane and the dream where I am falling into a bottomless pit?
In the bottomless pit, i am swallowed whole.
Has the author projected her fear into her story ? But this goes back to the author as a historical figure.

Punishment
Why should you care if I am the author?
Is this because you in some way are afraid of my ideas and want, like what Foucault and Barthes, say, to punish me for my ideas, for reminding you of the existentialist doubts you have always harboured. Thus by pinning ideas on me you can push ideas away as ideas being abstract cannot be struggled against. Not People. Is this why I always have this insatiable desire to look at the autobiography of people whose websites I search ? in thinking that when I see their photos and know the details of their lives I remove the danger ideas pose to me and punish the "person" responsible for frightening me ? Books were assigned real authors'only when the author became subject to punishment (Foucault, What is an author)
And yet is this bad, attributing ideas and stories to me ? Will I not benefit economically? That is if I can sell my "works" ?
So is not society that which defines/designates someone as the author ?

Society
Sacralization of the author's struggle with form has great consequences...permits Society to distant the work when it risks becoming an embarressment, to neutralize the revolt of passion the subversion of criticism (Barthes, Authors and Writers) You firmly believe in religion. What do you do with my fears, the anxieties that religion evidently brought about ? Or do you simply dismiss this as Art and reject the implicit criticism ? And to the secular audience, what do you do with Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky ? Do you reject the criticism of society, the breakdown in morality and see it merely as a story wellwrittened, just a perfection of an art form ? So is my story therefore reduce to a style of writing , as I was carried away by metaphors without caring for what they meant ? Do you even know what I am talking about? Is there only one meaning in this lexia ( which as a writer I should communicate only thought ) Is there pure communication ? OR can you find fissures and cracks in this lexia and find other meanings ? Then again you should understand. I am writing in the common form of writing, pruned of all stylistic embellishments for the sake of "clarity". I am using the form where thought is concentrated on (read the logic of my sentences and how I pattern them )

Work
What is a "work"? What or who makes the work if there is no author? Is this a work? ZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzahrwejraorbalgepgaea A cat pawing a keyboard could have done this. Is this a work? No I hear the cry! You say that there should be a human author. How about the fairy tales you lived with all your life ? Are they works ? But they have no authors. Why did you not cry out then ?
I
IF there is an author should everything be included since we define works by authors ?
Dear Mummy,
I will be home late.
Pei-Lin
Is this an author's work ?
OR in my primary school notebook 10x3=30.
So if you think I am an author by virtue that "I" wrote that short fiction, are the above my works?
So to understand my short story do you have to read this ?
Indeed, is there consistency in style in my writing ?