Politics Of Authorship Research Articles

Crossing the Mirror into Maternal Waters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)

ABSTRACT The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its “economy” and “forms” of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray's “the female imaginary”, Deleuze's “becoming-other”, Cixous's “écriture feminine”, Lyotard's “the figural” and Derrida's “chora”.

An “Entirely Personal” Success: Intertextuality and Self-Reflexive Ironies in Henry James’s “Pandora”

Henry James’s self-allusions in “Pandora” have been read as a rewriting of his former treatment of the “American Girl abroad” in the comic mode. The hints at “a Tauchnitz novel by an American author” (90) establish an ironical reversal of the failures of understanding which had led to tragedy in “Daisy Miller.” Yet the ironies in “Pandora” are multi-layered, often self-reflexive, and can be further interpreted in the light of James’s controversial adaptation of his famous novella for the stage. In this framework, well-known Jamesian topoi appear both as a (self-)parody and a metaliterary dialogue James engages with his readers and critics. The author’s personal implication in this “American” story is further testified by his Notebooks, in which James states his intention to write about his friends Henry and “Clover” Adams. Indeed, “Pandora”’s multi-layered intertextuality includes undeclared references to Adams’s anonymously published novel, Democracy, a semi-satirical account of U.S. political life. My article focuses on the web of intertextual relations woven in this short story with a view to reflecting on James’s ideas concerning the politics of authorship, readership, literary success, and the fate of the American Girl.

All for one or one for all? Authorship and the cross-sectoral valuation of credit in nutrition science

ABSTRACTThe passionate pursuit of authorships is fuelled by the value they represent to scholars and scientists. This article asks how this value differs across scientists and how these different processes of valuation inform authorship articulation, strategies, and publication behavior in general. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of authorship practices among nutrition scientists employed at universities, contract research organizations, and in food industry, I argue that two different modi operandi emerge when it comes to authorship. These different ways of working produce different collaborative approaches, different credit distribution strategies amongst collaborators, and different value placed upon (the pursuit of) authorship. These different valuation processes are neither explicit nor recognizable to those reading (and judging) author lists. As a consequence, in the politics of authorship, the names standing atop a scientific publication in nutrition science represent different types of value to both the individuals and employing organizations.

The politics of Vietnamese authorship

This introduction provides a brief overview of the articles in this volume. It highlights the development of a politics of authorship and authority in Vietnam and different roles of authors in different genres of text, and suggests ways of moving beyond a framing of authorship that endorses East/West and structuralist/contextualist dichotomies.

Snapshots of authorship and authority in Vietnamese historical writing

Until recently, the dominant interpretation of the concept of authorship in East and South East Asia held that in these regions there was no author—in the Western sense of the term—because authorship was communal and was determined by a layering of interpretations of classic texts through the process of commentary. This has allowed commentary on authorship in Asia to largely sidestep substantive critiques of the politics of authorship offered by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. While not refuting this interpretation, this article claims that the issue of authorship is considerably more complicated than this dominant interpretation might imply. In Vietnamese annals such as the Đại Việt Sữ Ký Toàn Thữ, commentators such as the literatus Ngô Sĩ Liên tried to assert their authorship by supplanting or refuting previous authors. In addition, the question of authorship in pre-modern Vietnam is often confused by the lack of a clear delineation between different languages and texts, which is why one can often find pre-modern texts interspersed with chữ Hán (classical Chinese), chữ Nôm (classical Vietnamese), quốc ngữ, and even Lao or Muong. These strategies of authorship changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on the work of Naoki Sakai, Keith W Taylor, and OW Wolters and on materials from the annals, civil service examinations, and modern writings, this article argues that the concepts of authorship, individual subjectivity in language, and language differentiation all coincided with the rise of nationalism at the turn of the 20th century. Authorship and nationalism are then tied to the concept of the separation and translation of languages and cultures, which are in turn related to the need to configure a particularistic Vietnamese identity vis-a-vis a perceived “West.”

Una política de autores para Latinoamérica. (Nuevos cines y nueva crítica: Argentina, Brasil, México en los sesenta) / A politique des auteurs for Latin America. (New cinemas and new criticism: Argentina, Brasil and México in the sixties)

Las décadas de 1950 y 1960 son las de la transición modernizadora en Latinoamérica: es el momento en que las estructuras industriales (ya sea que hubieran llegado a desarrollarse o no) parecen desfasarse en relación a los intereses de los nuevos cineastas. En esos años de grandes cambios estéticos, culturales y políticos, los directores jóvenes definen sus poéticas por contraste con el viejo cine de los estudios. Siguiendo el modelo de la politique des auteurs enunciada por los críticos de Cahiers du cinéma , la aparición de los nuevos cines en Latinoamérica adquiere características específicas según los contextos nacionales. Este ensayo pretende documentar las distintas reacciones de esos films de autor en las tres cinematografías que eran reconocidas como las más poderosas del continente: Argentina, Brasil y México. Palabras clave: Política de los autores / Nuevo cine latinoamericano / cine culto y cine popular / poética y política / Industria vs. revolución. The 1950s and 1960s are the decades of modernization in Latin America: it is the moment when industrial structures seem to fall out of phase in reference to the goals of the new filmmakers. During those years of aesthetic, cultural and political transformations, young directors define their poetics in confrontation with the old Studio system. Following the model of the politique des auteurs proposed by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma , the emergence of new cinemas in Latin America develops specific qualities according to the various national contexts. This essay explores the different reactions of these auteur films within the three national cinemas aknowledged, at that time, as the most powerful of the continent: Argentina, Brasil and Mexico. Keywords: Politics of Authorship / New Latin American Cinema / Popular cinema and highbrow cinema / Poetics and politics / Industry vs. revolution

Badges of distinction.

Machine-readable system seeks to clearly explain who did what for a research paper.

Lady Caroline Lamb Beyond Byron: Graham Hamilton, Female Authorship, and the Politics of Public Reputation

This article troubles the terms by which scholars have typically understood Lady Caroline Lamb's authorial career. I pay particular attention to the publicity that Lady Caroline received throughout her lifetime, her unpublished correspondence, and her second novel Graham Hamilton (1822). Graham Hamilton and the extensive archival record surrounding it challenge longstanding assumptions about Lady Caroline as little more than Byron's jilted lover turned scandalous author. I relocate Lady Caroline's authorial career and Graham Hamilton in particular alongside now-canonical work by Frances Burney as well as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, and in doing so I argue Lady Caroline's important place alongside them. Ultimately this article suggests that Lady Caroline's engagement with the politics of authorship and public identity demonstrate that her contributions to Romanticism extend beyond her well-known affair with Byron.

Narrations collectives et posture auctoriale dans la littérature post-coloniale maghrébine : une critique du classement culturel des modèles auctoriaux

Considering the author as a category which is always historically and poetically produced, this article focuses on the cultural and gender reference points of postcolonial authorship. Maghrebian authors, in particular, are frequently labeled as “Francophony” and “Maghrébinité” instead of being analyzed within different historical and literary systems. I will illustrate this idea using the example of two authors who make frequent use of collective narrative strategies, Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar. I will demonstrate that even if they directly refer to traditional narrative models (tribal myth, Hadith, Nouba, etc.), they do not revert to lost oral traditions (in the sense of Woodemansee’s “recovering collectivity,”). Rather, they develop a polyphony of voices: the voice of a single narrator loses authority, but the politics of authorship, the name of the author, is nonetheless affirmed, calling into question the cultural classification of literary models of authority.

From signing to strangling: Arthur Miller and the national security state

In ‘From Signing to Strangling: Arthur Miller, the Work of Art, and the National Security State’, I argue that two of Miller's major plays respond directly to trends in US Cold War politics—but in much more abstract ways than have yet been realized. Far from merely satirizing mores, Miller deployed a historically distinctive politics of authorship which sought to distinguish literary texts from the documents and archives of the security state. When The Crucible (1953) was received primarily as political allegory, Miller was incensed; by focusing on the final scene of the play, I show how John Proctor was meant less as a political, than an aesthetic, dissident. I extend my analysis to Miller's 1964 play After the Fall, which reworks the distinction between artistic and state discourses by way of a vanishing distinction between the marriage of two characters in the play, and Miller's own marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Via two scenes of strangulation, one in each play, Miller's work makes the mournful passage from work to text, from author to writer, consistent with critical understandings of the passage from modern to postmodern literatures.

Editor's Note: Twisted Legacies: Politics of Authorship

Editor's Note: Twisted Legacies: Politics of Authorship

Owen, Hilary and Claudia Pazos Alonso. Antigone's Daughters? Gender, Genealogy, and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2011. 255 pp.

Owen, Hilary and Claudia Pazos Alonso. Antigone's Daughters? Gender, Genealogy, and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2011. 255 pp.

The creation and circulation of public geographies

In response to the commentaries, we discuss further how social media disrupts and remakes the creation and circulation of geographical knowledges and potentially reconfigures the moral economy of the social sciences. In particular, we examine questions of what is meant by public geography, the publics which such geographies serve, alternative and complementary approaches to social media, the politics of authorship within collective blogs, the politics and mechanisms of knowledge circulation, and the extent to which social media has an impact beyond the academy, enacting ‘minimal politics’.

The Sex Politics of Authorship in Ben Jonson’s and Aemilia Lanyer’s Country House Poems.

The Sex Politics of Authorship in Ben Jonson’s and Aemilia Lanyer’s Country House Poems.

The Politics of Authorship: The Effects of Literary Property Law on Author-Publisher Relations

This article argues that the shift in author-publisher relations over the course of the nineteenth century, which has been characterized by scholars as alternatively either a “consecration” or a “degradation” of the author, was connected to a change in the law on literary property. Through a comparison of the terms of letters and contracts between authors and publishers before and after a landmark law of 1866, which extended literary property to 50 years after the death of the author, it shows that the new law favored publishers, by enabling them to monopolize and control the work of authors to an unprecedented extent. ( ch )

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest

Soft canons: American women writers and masculine tradition

In spite of the recovery of numerous women writers and the reconceptualizations of American literature since the 1980s, literary criticism has been slow to bring 19th-century male and female writers, so-called masculine and feminine traditions, together in dialogue. Addressing these separate spheres of criticism, the 16 essays establish and complicate literary genealogies as they explore connections, discuss mutual influences, and propose theories of difference and alliance to create an account of the period. Rather than conceiving of men's and women's writing in opposition, this text expands one's understanding of direct relationships between male and female authors and outlines the poignant absence of such relationships where they might have been most expected. The European contributors consider ways in which race, gender, sexuality and region inflect authorship and reading; gender, politics and economics, especially the economics and politics of authorship, form another important matrix of concerns. At the same time, the book investigates the relationship between gender and aesthetics, and it challenges the traditional view that women writers often create merely political texts.

Sexual Politics of Authorship: Rereading the travels and translations of Richard and Isabel Burton

Women who accompanied male adventurers and geographers often made crucial (yet generally unacknowledged) contributions to the research and writing of their partners. These women were not always named as authors, but nevertheless participated in the production and promotion of texts, influencing their form and their impact. In this light the author reconsiders the works of Isabel Burton, wife of the famous British Victorian traveller, geographer, translator and author, Richard Burton. Reinterpreting and recentring the marginalised and often caricatured Isabel Burton, it is shown that Isabel performed many roles in the 'Burton industry', influencing the production, content and circulation of texts attributed mainly to her husband. While Isabel frequently worked with her husband, she sometimes worked against him, subverting and recasting 'his' texts, partly in order to oppose her husband's sexual libertinism and to advance her own political agenda, which can be located within late-Victorian social purity movements. Isabel's involvement with the gendered politics of purity illustrates the second dimension in what the author calls the twofold sexual politics of authorship.