Author-Creator and Author-Model: Possible (Dis)Connections between Mikhail Bakhtin and Umberto Eco

Abstract

The Death of the Author was an essay published in 1967 by Roland Barthes. Two years later, Michel Foucault pronounced at a conference that the author had not died: he was only in an unceasing process of vanishing. However, for Mikhail Bakhtin and Umberto Eco, the author has always been and will always be alive in the text. On this aspect, Bakhtin and Eco had similar points of view when they sought to understand the essence of the author to whom Barthes referred. Mikhail Bakhtin had conceived of the author-creator; Umberto Eco had already elaborated the author-model. Given these possibilities, this article examines the differences and similarities between these two concepts: author-creator and author-model. When comparing them, we find that they are two active figures, who exert their creative and strategic forces in the text, and this functions as a relevant factor of approximation between these concepts.