Abstract

This essay assesses the contradiction between the widespread critical acceptance of the post-structuralist mortification of authorship, on one hand, and the rise and continued purchase of authorship-focused scholarship, on the other. What seems to be missing is a theory of authorship that takes into account the fact that authors themselves have had to reckon with authorship as a construction, particularly the ideological emphasis on genius as it was commercialized during the “industrial era” of print publication. Several stories by Henry James that stage author-reader relations offer glimpses of his idea of authorship and suggest that, for him, authorial self-consciousness plays out as a queer performance.

Highlights

  • “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face”

  • I should confess at the outset that in this examination of authorship — which is necessarily, an examination of authorship discourse — I will tread some well-worn ground: so well-worn that it might be described as worn through

  • To begin with motives: why revisit the authorship debates at all? Very I want to understand what Gertrude Stein thought she was doing when she composed, first in her little carnets, small notebooks that one might use for grocery lists, and in larger cahiers, often the sort of notebooks that French children used for schoolwork, texts that made no “sense”, in the usual sense of that term

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Summary

What We Talk About When We Talk About Authorship

One reason that the question of what Stein and others during the industrial era thought about authorship might have remained invisible to me for some time has to do with an interesting feature of the history of the critical discourse about authorship. Almost as much time has passed since 1995 as had elapsed between 1967 and 1995, and while Eggert’s diagnosis does bear the marks of its own moment (about which I’ll say more below), the stalemate has become, if anything, more fixed — and, paradoxically, less important, if we judge wheels of textual production, circulation, and consumption It is this expanded sense of “industry” that informs my use of the term “author industrial complex” below. Note that (a)uthorship with a small “a” represents that which tends to preoccupy editors, bibliographers, book historians, et al, while (A)uthorship with a (a)uthorship (A)uthorship

What is the history of authorship?
What Is It Like to Be an Author?
Queer Performance
Works Cited

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