Image constructions in literature. The author's image.

Image is an important concept in today's society, both on the macro-level of the economy and of politics and on the micro-level of the individual. Also within the literary field, image seems to be ever growing in importance. This importance manifests itself in the position of the successful writer as a media figure, but also in the rise of the autofictional genre. This project investigates the textual construciton of the author's image, on the one hand with the literaty text itself and on the other hand within other medial texts (websites, columns, interviews). In order to gain a more thorough insight into the image phenomenon within a literary context, the concept will be extracted from the research areas of marketing and sociology and implemented within the research program of semiotics (image as a medial construction of signs, cf. Roland Barthes Mythologies), the cultural studies (the influence of today's multimedial cultural industry on the identity concept) and literary theory (the opposition between the fictional and the extra-fictional, between the author, the implied author, the narrator and the characters). Both Michel Foucault's theory on the author function (Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?) and Wayne C. Booth's theory on the implied author (The Rethoric of Fiction) in which the author becomes a construction that springs from the literary text itself, will serve as theoretical backgrounds from which to investigate the matter.

Keywords:Semiotics, Identity, Autofiction, Author, Image

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies