Dead Author Research Articles

Books in ashes and scattered writings: Fictive archive destruction in fin-de-siècle Modern Greek literature

In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compelling terms are detected: syllogomania (‘collection frenzy’) and bibliomania (‘book frenzy’). Both very vividly illustrate the cultural landscape of fin-de-siècle Greece. The institutionalization of archives and the consolidation of the book culture were important aspects of the new-born state’s cultural politics and poetics. It is in this context that instances of literary discourse thematizing archival destruction appeared, taking the form of symbolic resistance against the canonization and institutionalization of memory. In the two texts discussed in the article, ‘Kostakis’s Manuscripts’ by Alexandra Papadopoulou (1896) and ‘Old Papers’ by Mikhail Mitsakis (1884), the laws of order, accumulation and preservation are opposed by a desire for disorder and dispersion. In the former, the manuscripts of a dead author are burnt to ashes by his girlfriend, who wishes to save them from being published. In the latter, a man scatters his writings in the wind, as a way of reactivating his memory. Both texts enact the cultural ambivalences of fin-de-siècle modernity by narrating the constant tension between, on one hand, canon and archive; and, on the other, waste and destruction. Through the destruction of fictional archives, the possibility of a counter-memory is claimed. Papadopoulou’s and Mitsakis’s claim of an overturning of the dynamics between cultural memory and oblivion can be considered as a call for questioning the laws that govern cultural memory’s circulation and for repositioning their auctorial figures in the history of Modern Greek literature.

Manner of Death Impacts the Death Effect in Literary Evaluation

The existence of a death effect—that the value of a creative work tends to increase after the creator has died—in literary evaluation was demonstrated. To replicate and extend previous findings, (N = 408) university students were asked to imagine being an art collector potentially interested in purchasing a short story. The status of the author varied from still being alive to having died from a car accident, suicide, or heart attack. Consistent with earlier work, students, when informed that the author was dead, offered to pay more money (81% more, on average) to purchase the story relative to students informed that the author was alive. Unique to this investigation, students offered the most money when told that the author died from a car accident. Priming students about death and dying boosted valuations. Unlike earlier work, subjective impressions about the author and the story were not affected by these manipulations. Mortality awareness and the relatability of the manner of death enhanced the desire for a perceived-to-be scarce product, in this case a creative literary work from a dead author.

The Diaristic Mode in Contemporary Art after Barthes

The rise of the diaristic mode in contemporary art might seem like the return of the dead author in a particularly self‐absorbed frame of mind. Yet the diary is a form of writing that relinquishes authorial control to the passing moods and contingencies of the day. The diarist writes hastily, automatically, involuntarily, thereby giving access to insights unavailable to deliberation. An account of Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, 2009, and his reflections on the diary as a form of writing serve to introduce the diaristic work of two contemporary artists, Moyra Davey and Susan Morris. Their work is directly informed by Barthes's and others' experiments with a mode of address that is intimate, but also de‐centred and fragmentary.

Postures of Dying: Eliot, Seneca and the Elizabethans

Abstract This article analyses the substantial intertextual relations between Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, Seneca’s tragedies, and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly in the depictions of dying speeches. It demonstrates, too, that ‘Gerontion’ is a prominent example of how Eliot’s poetry anticipates the issues explored in his critical prose—in this case, notably ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. Further, the article relates the use of what Eliot called ‘saturated’ images in early modern drama and his own poetry with his theories of poetic creation and originality. In so doing, it argues that, contrary to the accepted critical narrative, the famous description of a ‘profound kinship’ with an unnamed ‘dead author’ that Eliot describes in ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, may not primarily and exclusively refer to Jules Laforgue.

A invenção machadiana e o experimentalismo sterniano como prolegômenos ao século XX: poéticas polifônicas e autoconsciência da multiplicidade

A poética do romance passa por grandes transformações com autores como Xavier de Maistre e Laurence Sterne (no século XVIII) e Machado de Assis (no XIX). Nesta proposta, destacamos as obras A vida e as opiniões do Cavaleiro Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759) eMemórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Assis 1880), cuja publicação em folhetim completa 140 anos em 2020. Entendendo Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas como primeiro romance brasileiro experimental, observamos as marcas da linguagem de Sterne e de Maistre evocadas pelo defunto autor Brás Cubas desde o Prólogo de suas Memórias, não por acaso, póstumas. Para tratar dos modos de fazer a autoconsciência narrativa, retomamos estilos ilimitados com Rabelais e Cervantes. Deambulando por prólogos romanescos, nos debruçamos sobre o “Ao leitor” de autoria machadiana. Amparados por pensadores do literário no século XX, como Carpeaux, Borges, Bakhtin e Calvino, estabelecemos relação entre os conceitos de polifonia e multiplicidade em uma compreensão do literário sem modelos estáveis e hierarquizados. Nesse sentido, descortinamos a condição de uma poética tanatográfica do autor criado Brás Cubas, da qual emanam desejos e movem-se formas romanescas autoconscientes em constante decomposição biográfica.

Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace

The power of David Foster Wallace’s narrative persona has only increased since his death in 2008; however, his early fiction presents alternate perspectives on authorial presence beyond the commonly accepted discourse on Wallace. A closer look at the authorial poses in The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair challenges the tidiness of a narrative that privileges sincerity at the expense of a discussion of such a notion’s assumptions and blind spots. In contrast to this narrative, Wallace pursues modes of authorship based in concealment throughout Broom and Girl, hiding his presence via a variety of boundaries, masks, queer personas, crosswriting, and imitative voices, to wildly varying degrees of success. In place of an intimate sense of presence, readers of these works receive a very different conception of authorship that crafts a series of imperial personas that adopt totalizing and phallocentric authorial positions that linger throughout Wallace’s body of work. However, several stories in Girl not commonly discussed in Wallace scholarship experiment with another, more present and intimate mode of authorship that rejects gimmicky authorial masks and dead authors and instead develops an author figure whose persona is convex, reaching outward toward the reader in hope of colliding with them rather than absorbing them.

Kotzebues journalliterarisches Nachleben

Abstract Introduced in response to the assassination of August von Kotzebue, the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 marked a new era in German press and censorship history. Whereas the historical developments surrounding the Decrees have been well researched, this article traces Kotzebue’s literary afterlife by focusing on a series of fictional letters ostensibly written by the dead author. Drawing on the genre tradition of the dialogues of the dead, this fictional correspondence was published (and occasionally censored) in various periodicals of the early 1820 s and thus explored the manifold ramifications of the new restrictive press law.

Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Dorothea or Jane? The Dilemmas of Early Feminist Criticism

I have never forgotten a comment made by a friend at the first feminist meeting, held in Bloomington Indiana, in the spring of 1969: “Nothing travels faster than an idea whose time has come.” We were amazed and thrilled to discover how much we had in common with other women, and how the women's movement in its early stages gave us permission to express in public a variety of extreme emotions. All of us at that meeting were young, untenured faculty and graduate students, and suddenly—or at least so it seemed—we could speak out against authority. And sometimes authority listened. We quickly turned to writing, our natural medium, for we realized that our academic work had an immediate resonance with our political ambitions. How rare and special this moment was for those of us who worked on the literature of dead authors!

Editors' Note

Editors' Note

Neglect, Death, and Apostasy: Narrating Living Authorship in Romantic Periodicals

With their emphasis on reviewing new publications and their interest in determining literary value, Romantic periodicals were uniquely positioned to problematize the fact that an author was alive. While the reception of dead authors had begun to incorporate biography as a critical criterion in the eighteenth century, it was Romantic periodicals that confronted the problems of applying such modes of evaluation to the still-living. Popular Romantic narratives of living authorship reveal the difficulties of assessing political and literary worth during careers that had yet to unfold. While the popular narrative of the neglected author replaces present experience with the promise of redemption by posterity, narratives of authorial death and apostasy draw attention to the fledgling professional author’s precarious economic position. The living author emerges as a compromised figure, for whom a pejorative meaning of “authorship” as pernicious self-promotion uneasily coexists with the prospect of reevaluation by posterity.

The book, the tourist and the corpse in the garden: object lessons from Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot and Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire

ABSTRACT At first sight, Julian Barnes and Michel Houellebecq are two authors with little in common, but this article uncovers a shared interest in the life of objects and their capacity to shape and sometimes eclipse the subject. Both Flaubert’s Parrot and La Carte et le Territoire raise compelling questions about subject object relations and their special relevance for the institution of authorship. In a reading that tracks the novels’ common concerns with tourists, copies and dead authors, I trace the lineage of these concerns back to eighteenth century debates over the relationship between authors and the material book and forward to new anxieties surfacing as the anticipated death of the material book reanimates questions of what makes an author. By foregrounding the role of tourists in literary culture, both novels challenge the conventions of anti-tourist discourse, inviting us to consider whether tourists played a part in bringing authors to life, and whether they may perform a similar service for the book.

Jane Austen e o fenômeno da autoria-zumbi em Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, is a literary mashup, the fragmentation procedure of a classic work to graft elements of contemporary pop culture. One of the main questions raised by the novel involves the game of palimpsest inherent to its authorship, since the work was produced through the writing of a dead author (Austen) and a living author (Grahame-Smith). However, it should be noted that the English novelist of the regency period had already experienced intricate dynamics for the attribution of authorship to her own works when it was first published. In this context, the present article analyzes the game between living author and dead letter (or between living work and dead writer), so remarkable in the artistic collaboration that generated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

“Because He's Not Here”: Edith Wharton's Study in the Afterlife, Ghosts, and the Art of Belief

Abstract In her writings about ghost stories, Edith Wharton points out the importance of believing consciously in ghosts in order to enjoy the stories, but it seems that Wharton uses the genre to say something more about belief. Through her ghost stories, Wharton, though she generally emphasizes rationality, places herself between the rational and the irrational, a space where something or someone “not here” could be technically “here.” In this respect, Wharton makes her ghost stories a space to speculate on metaphysical questions which, in the context of William James's philosophy of religion and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualism, was often regarded as irrational. In “The Fulness of Life,” Wharton assumes the afterlife as fact and searches for the possibility of settling difficult earthly matters in the world of the dead. Later, in “Mr. Jones,” she seeks the possible path of literary afterlife through the ghost figure and through allusions to dead authors like Edgar Allan Poe. Finally, in “The Looking-Glass,” Wharton combines themes from earlier stories, presenting a character who mediates between true and false spiritualism and between spiritualism and Catholicism.

Dead poets' property—how does copyright influence price?

AbstractCopyrights create long‐lived intellectual property in goods ranging from science, literature, and music to news, film, and software. The economic effects of copyright, however, are difficult to identify in modern settings. This article exploits an unintended differential increase in copyright length under the UK Copyright Act of 1814—in favor of books by dead authors—to examine the effects of longer copyright terms on price. We find that a doubling in copyright length was associated with a substantial (roughly 50%) increase in the price of books. Additional years of copyright improved publishers' ability to practice intertemporal price discrimination.

<i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i>: um corpo (textual) zumbificado

Ao final da primeira década do novo milênio, o mercado editorial assistiu à ascensão de uma nova forma de composição textual, o mashup literário, produzido através de movimentos de leitura e escritura que potencializam a noção barthesiana do texto como “tecido de citações”. Para tanto, o mashup se baseia em procedimentos de fragmentação de uma obra clássica para nela enxertar elementos caros à cultura pop hodierna. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, de Jane Austen e Seth Grahame-Smith, foi o precursor dessa tendência, abrindo caminho para um novo filão na indústria de best-sellers produzidos segundo os mesmos procedimentos. Diante de tal contexto, o presente artigo analisa a obra Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a fim de entender, em termos de imanência, os procedimentos pelos quais, nas entranhas do romance, fundiu-se a escrita oitocentista de Austen com a contemporânea de Grahame-Smith, formando uma híbrida obra, também ela zumbi, dado que habita um entre-lugar entre a escrita de uma autora morta e de um autor vivo. Desse modo, adotando a imagem do zumbi não só como elemento acrescido ao enredo, mas como processo de escrita e adaptação – pela zumbificação do romance de Jane Austen –, objetivamos analisar as entranhas de Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, partindo do conceito de mashup literário, gênero que ensejou a mistura entre diferentes textos na obra, por meio de procedimentos de hibridização. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a762.

Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry by Michael Gamer

Book Reviews Michael Gamer. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 307. $99.99. A sure sign ofa good critical book is surprise that it hasn’t been written be­ fore. This is so with Michael Gamer’s Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business ofPoetry, whose “primary interest lies ... in the tactics ofliterary production” (9). The argument is cogent, persuasive, and yet fresh. Gamer coins the term “re-collection,” which he defines “as the autho­ rized, transformational reprinting of works that have appeared earlier in some other form” (2). Re-collection allowed authors to combine concern with making their work salable, while maintaining artistic integrity: it “held out to writers the prospect ofa second chance” through “redirecting earlier work to more profitable or prestigious ends” (3). The poet, then, acts as a curator of their own work; displaying it, repositioning it, contextualizing it, and so on, as suits. Indeed, “If their curated literary corpuses tell us nothing else, they document ongoing, sometimes careerlong tugs of war between lucre and fame, profit and reputation, and selfcommodification and self-canonization” (10). Chapter One, “Corpus, Canon, and the Self-Collected Author,” consid­ ers how anthologies affected contemporary writers. The habit of antholo­ gies to include only dead authors, and not living ones, standardized since John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (1777—82), and in part explained by changes to copyright understandings after 1774, meant that the treatment ofdead and living authors diverged in terms of canonization; the dead poet could be lauded in ways that a living one could not. Hence, Gamer notes, Keats could comfort himself, during the storm of post-Endymion criticism, with the thought, “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.” There grew to be a sense that a poet’s death was in fact a dual death: the death of the human; and the death of the poet, to be memorial­ ized or grave-robbed by others. This brought about a concern among liv­ ing authors with shaping how they hoped to be canonized posthumously. Gamer outlines the often overlooked importance ofthe 1808 parliamentary debates and 1814 Copyright Act, and how they “focused [Romantic au­ thors’] attention on copyright and began to alter their own authorial behaviours accordingly” (45), especially with regard to their posthumous poetic legacy. SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 285 286 BOOK REVIEWS Chapter Two, “Subscription Reprinting,” concerns Charlotte Smith, during the “relatively serene period (1786-89) when she was at the height of her popularity as a fashionable author” (57). The chapter explores “how economic opportunity impacts poetic and bibliographic form” through the case-study of Smith’s third and fifth editions of Elegiac Sonnets (57). During this period, Smith’s letters to her publisher, Thomas Cadell Sr., disclose an author “more caught up in the details of the publishing process than in the creative act” (Judith Phillips Stanton, editor of Smith’s Collected Letters, quoted, 73). The third edition’s additional paratextual materials turn what had previously been a pamphlet into “a collection”: “not a revision but a renovation” (60). The fifth edition was published by subscription, which Gamer argues was staggeringly unusual (79—80); indeed, it was “unique in being the only book of the 1780s to be published first commercially, and only later by subscription” (80). The chapter describes Smith’s adroitness in procuring that material previously published be purchased again (more ex­ pensively). In addition, Gamer shows how Smith strove to hide the entrepreneurialism, revealed by her publishing choices, in the Elegiac Son­ nets themselves. Chapter Three, “Bell’s Poetics,” examines the response to the Della Cruscans. It is not concerned, as others have been, with the Della Cruscans’ influence per se, but instead “what it means to move from newspaper to book” in terms of publication (92). Gamer “tracks the Della Cruscan movement from its beginnings in . . . the pages of The World newspaper and the two collections that grew out of it, Edward Topham’s Poetry ofthe World (1788) and John Bell’s British Album (1790)” (92). Gamer examines William Gifford’s poetical response, The Baviad: A Paraphrastic Imitation ofthe First Satire ofPersius (1791), and argues that Gifford...

A matéria do homem: a expansão dos limites do “ser” na narrativa de Absalão, Absalão! de William Faulkner

O romance Absalão, Absalão! de Willian Faulkner vale-se de recursos narrativos que aproximam a existência de seus personagens, em múltiplos planos narrativos, à materialidade dos textos orais e escritos de que compõem-se as suas memórias. Este trabalho propõe-se a tarefa de refletir sobre o texto como marca humana e extensão do “ser”, com base na narrativa de Faulkner. Para tanto, mencionaremos a questão da autoria e associaremos a ideia do autor morto à escrita tumular, recorrente na obra, para exemplificar a tentativa do homem de sobreviver ao tempo, e nos apoiaremos no pensamento de Henri Bergson que atribui importância ao corpo para a composição da memória em oposição à concepção do cérebro como depósito de memórias. Por fim, consideraremos o esquecimento como forma de escritura e, ainda nos valendo do pensamento de Bergson, que sugere uma matéria contínua, proporemos uma leitura que considera a continuidade universal e inscreve, inclusive, o leitor na narrativa ficcional.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

A Dead Author to Be Resurrected: The Ambiguity of American Democracy in Herman Melville’s Pierre

A Dead Author to Be Resurrected: The Ambiguity of American Democracy in Herman Melville’s <i>Pierre</i>