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Foucault
Foucault's essay " What is an Author?" is a landmark work in hypertext theory. However, like so much second level theory (theory that appropriates key writers to various ideas or agendas) there are only one or two passages from this essay that hypertext uses, and these are almost minor in the context of the essay.
(Of course, when we use someone else's work there are often highly creative and valuable appropriations that can occur. These are what I like to characterise as 'noisey' uses of theory, ones that could well be verging on erroneous in relation to the original material, but which through their misreadings produce new insights. This is an example of how the distance between things is important to making ideas.)
Foucault's general ideas about the author and discourse are important for hypertext theory. Though I suspect there are actually aspects of this essay (perhaps the denser bits) that might be more productive in thinking about the web.
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