The Return of the Author

“Metafizika” Journal (ISSN 2616-6879) S. № 3, 2018

This paper scrutinizes how Roland Barthes’ notion of Text can be reinter¬pre¬ted in the Inter¬net era. Barthes' “From Work to Text” is the main theoretical piece on which the ar¬ticle’s theoretical framework is grounded. Geoff Ryman's 253: or Tu¬be Theat¬re is taken to serve as the example for Internet hypertext literature, and is exa¬mined vis a vis Barthes' conceptualizations and ideas. The essay starts with a brief discussion on the nature of Internet literature in re¬la¬tion to that of print literature. This discussion consists of ‘the transition pe¬riod’ spi¬rit in literature, and the advantages of Internet publishing. The essence of this part is about how traditional paper-based print literature is endangered by on¬li¬ne publishing. After the section on the new literature style come the analysis of Barthes' “Text” and the application of his theories on 253. In this analysis, Barthes' text is ‘des¬tructed’ into three metaphors: the metaphors of Text as the sea, the network and the game. Analysis of 253 according to Barthes follows the same order as quo¬ta¬tions from Barthes. After the comparative analysis of “From Work to Text” and 253, the paper fo¬cuses on the contributions of 253 in the framework of the old questions of li¬te¬ra¬tu¬re. These questions include collaborative authorship, Internet readership, self-ref¬lexivity and fundamental authorship.

Roland Barthes’s famous essay on the “Death of the Author” inaugurated an intense reflection on the progressive dwindling of the importance of the traditional biographic idea of ‘author’ in the activity of receiving and interpreting a text, especially a literary one. In the new epistemic era favored by the emergence and affirmation of structuralism, the meaning of a text was, indeed, no longer seen as stemming from an individual agency, but from the social dimensions of language and culture. As digital communication is progressively supplanting every form of non-digital meaning transmission, though, present-day semiospheres are confronted with a different scenario: on the one hand, ‘empirical' authors are actually becoming more and more prominent, meaning that audiences are starving for non-digital and ‘auratic’ experiences of encounter with meaning, minding more meeting with authors, for instance, than reading their novels; on the other hand, given the easiness of meaning production with digital technology, the same cultures are going through a progressive ‘agony of the reader’: individuals are so intent in creating new particles of meaning, with impatient and daily frenzy, that they never become patient readers of other people’s meaning creations, especially if these challenge the instantaneousness that characterizes the contemporary digital communication. The shortness of present-day meaning creation and its lack of audience is bound to change the entire semiosphere. The essay aims at foreseeing some of these changes, pinpointing one the main features of Narcissism in the digital era.

Človek a spoločnosť, 2019

This text presents the concept of the romantic author in a broader context. Firstly, it points out its roots connected with antics (Bennett, 2005), then it describes its pre-concept, which is rooted during the rise of the typography (Ong, 2005), and finally it directly concentrates on the era where this concept is truly formed (Abrams, 1958). Based on these opening statements, the author of this text defines the concept of the romantic author in the sense of an individual sovereign creator in the context of western traditional authorship. Then the text points out its main goal to concentrate on the selected concepts, in order to demonstrate the contemporary overcoming of the author who is grounded in the western tradition. The author of this text uses an interdisciplinary approach in order to describe the topic, but primarily he prefers the approach of the media epistemology, based on which he classifies the subject of his interest in three key categories: firstly, he defines the concept of the romantic author in terms of its birth and its non-global character; secondly, he is oriented on the metaphor of the death of the author (Barthes, 1984), which Carpentier (2011) considers as a starting point for the weakening of the sovereign authorial position in order to present fantasies, which reflect this shift; and thirdly, he is concentrated on the term produsage (Bruns, 2008), where the author eventually (not just metaphorically) disappears, and points out the necessity of the produsage liberation from its techno-optimism. The article then presents two different approaches which reflect the actual overcoming of the romantic author in the sense of an individual creator in the context of the contemporary information society. The first one (Balve, 2014) refers to the birth of typography, which he describes in relation to the authorship in terms of speculative historical narration, and further he strives to keep this idea in the sense of genuine authorship, while he simultaneously points out its ideological construct. In contrast, the second approach (Sutherland-Smith, 2005) inclines to the overcoming of this idea, because it is no longer valid, and prefers establishing a so-called new order (Myers, 1998), which would simultaneously reflect this shift in the context of the World Wide Web. The author of this article prefers this second approach, because this very concept allows us to liberate the concept of traditional authorship from its obsolescence and to point out its very real overcoming. The text then comes to the second key point, constructed by the previously mentioned media epistemology, and clarifies the author/viewer convergence with the reference to Carpentier and his utopian and dystopian fantasies. Carpentier classifies them into three categories: firstly, into the modernist concept of the cultural professional, who symbolizes a nostalgic effort to keep the obsolete order; secondly, into a still modernist form of the author/viewer convergence, which is dystopian or utopian (produsage); and thirdly, into the postmodern, late-modern or fluid-modern form while he refers to the utopian participatory fantasy (Pateman, 1970) as the most preferred approach. The author of this text ultimately doesn't agree with Carpentier and prefers the concept of produsage as the only type of fantasy which captures the very real overcoming of the sovereign individual romantic author. The author then points out the necessity of liberating the produsage from its modernist utopian ideas and the need to accept the author/viewer convergence in full range (via produsage) and to put it into the context of contemporary

European journal of volunteering and community-based projects, 2022

Since the accessibility of the internet, cyber literature can be an act of bringing ease, evolving preferences and mindsets. This research may be a survey focused on the opinions of the respondents on the nature of social media cyber literature; of its gain and effect on the reader. This research is limited to the collective poems on Facebook. The logic is simple; the shortened version is preferred. Poetry is more likely to be used for the interpretation of reader-writer interactivity in cyber literature. The technique is the literary theory of reader reaction with attention to Facebook's reader-writer personalization. The objectives of this article were to expose the impetus of audiences to react to the submitted text, the reasons why they really like, and what its benefits are. The findings showed that cyber literature is effective in implementing a substitute writing style that also improves writers' enthusiasm and imagination to make use of the digital content.

Citeseer

Contemporary society has become an information society and hence it makes sense to interpret various changes in the cultural sphere. Connections between computer technology and literature are one aspect of the complicated global set of problems in tackling the adaptation of texts with the media. The article focuses on what happens with literary texts in cyberspace, how they adapt to that environment, and it examines the forms of "cyberliterature". The most comprehensive definition of cyberliterature derives from the concept of digital literature, i.e. literature created on the computer and presented by means of the computer. Trying to narrow the concept of cyberliterature, it can be characterised by certain computer-specific qualities: multi-linearity, different parts of hypertexts connected by links, uniting the written text with multimedia, interactivity etc. The second part of the article analyses a specific sub-category, one of the most intriguing border areas of cyberliterature -fanfiction. Fanfiction signifies texts mainly created as 'pseudo-sequels' to a book, comic strip, TV-series or film, and that are not written by professional authors but by fans. A separate section of fanfiction consists of texts written by aficionados of a pop or rock group -this is the case of "real person fiction". Cyberliterature is part of a larger set of problems, the most general background of which is the increasing role of technology in our society. Other factors include the myriad opportunities that characterise the postmodernist cultural situation, the expansion of the concept of literature and the emergence of new forms of literature.

Poetics Today, 2010

Electronic literature is not just a "thing" or a "medium" or even a body of "works" in various "genres." It is not poetry, fiction, hypertext, gaming, codework, or some new admixture of all these practices. E-literature is, arguably, an emerging cultural form, as much a collective creation of terms, keywords, genres, structures, and institutions as it is the production of new literary objects. The ideas of cybervisionaries Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson, foundational to the electronic storage, recovery, and processing of texts, go beyond practical insights and can be seen to participate in a long-standing ambition to construct a world literature in the sense put forward by David Damrosch (2003: 5): "not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading . . . that is applicable to individual works as to bodies of material." The model for such constructions may be not the global literary commerce envisioned by Goethe and adopted by Karl Marx, not the romantic tradition of poets as world legislators, and not the current model of a "world republic of letters." The model adopted in this essay, rather, is the literary practice of writing under constraint, developed long before the Internet but suited to its computational impositions and gamelike literary presentations. Instead of a canon of works preserved solely by the power of institutions, the essay presents a freestanding network of authors as precursors to, and models for, this potential world literature, namely, the Oulipo.

This article explores the social representation of Information Technology and Network Society from Barthes' semiology, using his ideas about myth creation and the connotation of ideological discourses through naturalization. Supplemented with some concepts from Peirce and Santaella, we try to identify and understand these mystification mechanisms and how they affect the creation of an information order; in this case, a digital order. We conclude that we are before an evangelizing discursive alignment based on mythical elements arisen from our aversion to uncertainty, the energy-saving principle, and an engineering discourse guided by the urgency of profit and power. We highlight the presence of a reckless narrative that permanently repeats the urgent need for information technology and digitalization without considering side effects or costs.

The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.