Abstract
The paper examines the role of the author in conceptual poetry, currently a major strand of contemporary American avant-garde literature which can be characterized by its emphasis on appropriative techniques. Applying the term authorial function (as introduced in 1969 by Michel Foucault) to the work of the American poet and appellate attorney Vanessa Place (*1972), it demonstrates that the subject of conceptual poetry is still rooted within Romantic aesthetics, despite some of the conceptualists' claims to the contrary.
In Place's Gone With the Wind (2009 -) Twitter project, the declared "death of the author" (i.e. a textual performance of the extreme suppression of expressive function) situates the author into an ever more interpretive and performative role and so exposes their public persona. In this way, it serves as an example and a critique of the discriminatory functioning of literature as an institution.
At the same time, the mutually constitutive relationship between discipline and expression in general and the concomitant avant-garde's fetishization of the limits of language are made apparent.