Author Function and the Audience Fiction

After reading Ong's essay on the author's audience, I was wondering if it had any implications on our understanding of the author-function. Foucault wrote "The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within society"(908). Foucault's essay details a variety of issues about the author-function but I think his analysis on the purpose of writing is a helpful piece in trying to connect Ong and Foucault. He writes about writing "it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears"(905). What he means is that in the act of writing, the written works seems to take on a life of its own and it exists externally of the author. The author, then, is merely a descriptor of any written work in question.

In his essay, The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction, Walter Ong discusses the notion that an author's audience is not some collective that responds and engages with the author as he writes a piece. Rather, "the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some of sort of role"(12). Additionally, the audience must fictionalize itself, Ong says, in order to fulfill the role the writer has fictionalized for them(12). It would seem that Ong is expanding the role of the author to not only include one whose name is a descriptor of their written work, but also one who interacts with an audience by fictionalizing them and creating a role for them to inhabit while reading a work.

Do you think this stands? Does Ong expand our notion of the role of the author or is he simply trying to discuss the author-audience relationship?