Who is an author?

[Terrance]

http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/boydpf1.htm

There is no question but that great literary works are often one of a
kind. Pale Fire, Dante's Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote,
Whitman's Song Of Myself, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Traditional literary
Genres are not adequate to determine the essential feature of such
works. If, on the other had, they are considered as simply one of a
kind, no science of them is possible. 

The understanding of a literary work by Poetic or Literary Criticism may
not be required for the enjoyment of the work, but it is knowledge (the
semantic or linguistic  Turn or the post printing press reformulation of
Hellenistic epistemological concern with knowing as text--reading as
writing &Co.) of why the work is enjoyable. One may be Turned off (The
Resistance to Theory, Paul de Man) by the Humpty-Dumptyisms and jargon,
the language of Lit-Crit, the slippery slope down tin term alley into
gibberish lane's cul de sac where Saussure stands holding a Sign, the
seemingly endless Re-construction of questions, the phony objectivity
and the political ax grinding on Newer Critical wheels, and one may
begin wondering what 'difference' it makes what the Sign makers make if,
as Molly says to Bloom, you can't tell me in plane words that a rock is
a rock, oh rocks! that 'ordinary speech' is  the 'literariness' of
literary language ... what a rough draft is doing now when a stiff wind
blows under the door my dear?