The Theory of the Work

Though this was really only a qualification in Foucalt's essay, the concept that a literary work has no definitive bounds is certainly an intriguing one.  Foucalt uses the example of the "notation of a meeting, or of an address, or a laundry list."  My initial reaction is that this view is intentionally naive; we may not be able to say without qualification that something is or is not a work, but we can probably go ahead and exclude notations of appointments or laundry lists.  This led me to try to imagine a definition of a work.  What I settled on, for a time, was that a work was text that the author intended as a work; that is, the author wrote it purposefully in pursuit of literary, informative, or commercial goals.  But this definition is flawed; we as a culture see relevance, see artistic merit, in all manner of private notations--many of Bob Dylan's so-called "speed ramblings," which at the time were nothing more than an outlet, ultimately were compiled into the literary work Tarantula.  This example also illustrates that an author's view of his/her text isn't static--what may be artless or irrelevant now may later be of distinct importance and as such warrant literary recognition.

So I'll pose another open question: how does one define a work?