What Was an Author?

Abstract

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988 For long time now critics and theorists of literature have remarked upon disappearance-or death-of author, but survey of these recent contributions to field of literary scholarship suggests that reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. One might even say that he is resurrected in these works as an afflicted, but by no means terminal, exemplar of capitalist civilization. Perhaps not surprisingly, he returns to us changed man: transubstantiated by newer modes of cultural analysis, he is now frequently woman or, even more frequently, an aggregate-the idea of authorship itself. In whatever form, he is getting renewed attention and contributing to vigorous reappraisals of American literary history. The four titles at hand range chronologically over much of that historyfrom late eighteenth century to very present-giving us curiously synoptic view of fate of American author. Michel Foucault has told us that the coming into being of notion of 'author' constitutes privileged, but historically unspecified, moment of individualization in Western culture (141). For Kenneth Dauber, coming into being of notion of specifically American author can be traced to composition of Benjamin Autobiography, an event (and text) to which he accords extraordinary privilege. But in Dauber's view, Autobiography merits this privilege not because it individualizes author, but rather because it deindividualizes him. The authorship of Autobiography is almost irrelevant, as Dauber presents it, because it is a work continuous with its readership, truly American epic (10). What Harriet Beecher Stowe said of Uncle Tom's Cabin (I did not write it: God wrote it!), Dauber would say-more secularly-of Autobiography: Franklin did not write it; America did. The work, thus conceived, is absolutely coextensive with culture that produced it: Franklin's Autobiography is created by community which thereby creates itself (18). The structure and logic of Dauber's book pivot on this principal equation, for never again, in his view, will American authorship and readership be poised so happily. The chronicle of life establishes the foundation of new literature