Contemporary literary and cultural theory draws some of its most signi_cant inspiration from considering the relationship between the author and the text, arguing for the priority of language and construction over any clear link between the author's name and his or her ‘genius’. However, despite Roland Barthes’ argument that the author is simply a collection of codes of meaning, Jacques Derrida's that a text's writtenness will always become apparent, and Michel Foucault's rhetorical question, ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’, the examples of literary hoaxes and false memoirs in the present study suggest that even those instances that seem to demonstrate the distinction between author and text become the very occasions for insisting upon their close relationship. The interest taken in a text, its literary and literal value, and its continued existence in the public realm, are all viewed in relation to the author's connection to the text.

Indeed, contemporary cultural theory is often viewed as the inspiration for hoaxes and fakes, and criticised as a way of excusing them. Postmodernism, seen in the sense not of an aesthetic era or a school of analysis but as a dangerously anarchic relativism, is often explicitly named as the reason why, for instance, a middle-class Californian Valley Girl should write a memoir in the persona of a mixed-race gang member, or an American lecturer publish poetry in the guise of a survivor of Hiroshima. However, the long history of literary deceptions, and the varied reasons why they occur, suggest that postmodernism cannot be to blame. By contrast, it is an imperative of extreme or unusual experience, as well as its marketability, that unites the deceptions under discussion here, giving them a readership that they might otherwise not have had. In an instance of using the postmodern technique of collage and citation against it, the physicist Alan Sokal attempted to reveal the insubstantiality of the postmodern emperor's clothes in an article published in Social Text, entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’.