ABSTRACT
Though the author has been declared dead, particularly by Roland Barthes,1 reports of his or her demise often seem highly exaggerated as the figure reappears with stubborn persistence to reaffirm its originary creative power over the vicissitudes of language and texts in which its identity is supposed to be constructed and displaced. Even the analogy between author and God endures, though with some degree of irony, as Brian McHale observes in his book on postmodernist writing.2 Bearing the traces of Romantic attempts at a godlike transcendence by means of the authorial imagination, the author that lingers in postmodern forms of writing seems to have undiminished humanist aspirations towards resourcefully displaying authority and creativity.
