Abstract: In recent decades radically historicist perspectives on the natures of the text and the author have emerged. Aceording to these historicist perspectives, pioneered by Barthes and Foucault, text and author are properly to be viewed as the realizations of many different kinds of functions, with history supplying the conditions of possilbility for the realization of these functions. Withoult the author, interpretation becomes impossible (this was the aim of Barthes and Foucault). Against Barthes and Foucault, Alexander Nehamas has provided an account of text and author which avoids the strictures of Barthes and Nehamas. Using the work of Gilles Deleuze, and discussing Mo Yan. I view text and author in a radically different way which allows the text to have sense but without the need for interpretation.

Key words: Gilles Deleuze, Alexander Nehamas, literary text, Mo Yan