Who Is The Author?

Abstract: This article begins by examining the issue of authorship in classical Greek and medieval exegetical literary cultures and then proceeds to explore the tendencies that point to the ‘disappearance’ of the author in nineteenth-century literary studies. It continues by focusing on Barthes’s and Foucault’s theories of authorship, which inspired a seminal postmodern belief: that the subject (author) is a fictional emanation of language and writing, which subvert all attempts by the human agent to be the source of action. Then relying on John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras, the article highlights the ontological interpretation of the person given by the so-called Cappadocians: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. Based on the ontological understanding of the person as freedom, this article concludes by proving its hypothesis that the author is, in fact, a person and a hypostatic-ecstatic being as well as that a literary work is a reflection of personal character, not a mere tissue of quotations or intertext. On the contrary, it is always the work of a specific author.