Beyond the Death of the Author. Authorial Regimes and Ecologies in the Age of Digital Globalization

Abstract

In recent times, scholars have been working under the assumption that authorship and authorial studies have both reached a theoretical end point. What is clear, though, is that we are no longer inhabiting the same literary field and cultural climate that gave rise to those notorious ideas put forth about authorship in the late 1960s. This article will try to explain how new research tools can account for the ways in which authorship works in a digitally globalized age, especially in the wake of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and postmodern ideas and practices. The ecology of authorship maps out a network of interacting systems (authorship as function, figure, form, and force) which seem to be in play for any historical regime of authorship, including our most recent one. Consequently, this paper will also try to explain contemporary modes of authoriality and some of the transformations that underpin them.