"[I]t is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures" (What is an author? 145).
The whole operations in creating or constructing an author involve rigorous processes in which "the operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned" (143). Nonetheless, Foucault subscribes to Saint Jerome's postulated criteria, of which there are inadequately four of them, believed to be "transhistorical constants...that govern the construction of an author" (143). They are as follows,
