“Authorship.”

Authorship, 2015

The evolution of our literate culture across the millennia has been marked by clearly identified and well-documented milestones in the history of reading and writing technologies. Changes in literacy, understood as the sum of reading and writing practices, have always followed such milestones at some remove. Not only are they much more diffuse in character and much harder to identify and describe, but they stand in a tenuous cause-and-effect relationship to the technologies in question. This article makes a plea for a stronger awareness of the effects of technology on our literate culture. Reading has always received a fair amount of attention (with the history of reading being a prominent subdiscipline of the field of book studies), but it should be recognized that its corollary, authorship, is a central, and, as digital technology is becoming ubiquitous—at least in the Western world—, increasingly important part of our literate culture, too. With Web 2.0 technology enabling more p...

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 2010

This Article explores what authorship and creative production mean in the digital age. Notions of the author as the creator of the work have, since the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1 710, provided a point of reference for recognizing ownership rights in literary and artistic works in conventional copyright jurisprudence. The role of the author as both the creator and the producer of a work has been seen as distinct and separate from that of the publisher and user. Copyright laws and customary norms protect the author's rights in his creation, and provide the incentive to create. They also allow him to appropriate the social value that his creativity generates as recognition of his contribution towards society. By initially protecting the rights of authors in literary and artistic works as a property right, copyright laws have facilitated market transfers of private rights and directed use of these works toward the most socially beneficial uses. This Article proposes that in the digital age, when users of literary and artistic works are increasingly becoming authors themselves, the notion of authorship provides a mark of identification to connect the original author with the work in a market characterized by an abundance of derivative works and remixes of original content. The notion of authorship in the digital age attributes individual and collaborative contributions to the collective pool of information back to their respective authors. This Article proposes that the networked economy

The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, 2019

[sic] Journal for Literature and Cultural and Literary Translation, 2011

This article examines authorship as a socially embedded process by challenging Western notions of the autonomous creative genius. It considers social interactions between various agents in the field of literary production which in turn recovers the collective nature of modern authorship. Far from leaving it unexamined, it further contextualises authorial collectivity and its role in the emerging model of authorship.

Authorship, 2012

Introduction to a Special Topic Section of Authorship.

Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap 6, 33-45, 2014

2018

Literature and film generate symbolic as well as economic capital. As such, aesthetic productions exist in various contexts following contrasting rules. Which role(s) do authors and filmmakers play in positioning themselves in this conflictive relation? Bringing together fourteen essays by scholars from Germany, the USA, the UK and France, this volume examines the multiple ways in which the progressive (self-) fashioning of authors and filmmakers interacts with the public sphere, generating authorial postures, and thus arouses attention. It questions the autonomous nature of the artistic creation and highlights the parallels and differences between the more or less clear-cut national contexts, in order to elucidate the complexity of authorship from a multifaceted perspective, combining contributions from literary and cultural studies, as well as film, media, and communication studies. Dealing with Authorship, as a transversal venture, brings together reflections on leading critics, exploring works and postures of canonical and non-canonical authors and filmmakers. An uncommon and challenging picture of authorship is explored here, across national and international artistic fields that affect Africa, Europe and America. The volume raises the questions of cultural linkages between South and North, imbalances between the mainstream and the margins in an economic, literary or “racial” dimension, and, more broadly, the relation of power and agency between artists, editors, critics, publics, media and markets.

JoSch, 2018

In 2009, literacy scholars Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow made the startling claim that "nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today's modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's." Thanks to the advent of blogs and social media, many people are now authoring texts reaching audiences of 100 people or more (Pelli and Bigelow's defining criterion for authorship). Yet, despite the democratizing implications of Pelli and Bigelow's widely circulated claim, the influence of most digital age authors remains slight relative to the influence of those who utilize traditional publishing processes. This disparity is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the publishing of reference books, which remain largely the province of for-profit publishers and exude a cachet and influence qualitatively distinct from content published by social media authors (Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, etc.). Reference books for writing-dictionaries, writing handbooks, grammar handbooks-are often marketed, and subsequently received as prescriptive manuals, with rules handed down on high for writers meekly to learn and follow. Though some social media authors certainly have significant influence, their credibility pales in comparison to that of "the dictionary." The credibility of these books is in inverse relationship to the prominence of the authors. Unlike social media authorship, which is dependent on individual authors' social identities, modern reference publishing practices obscure authorship-to the extent that reading publics forget, for instance, that Webster's Dictionary began as the cultural work of Noah Webster, an eccentric American nationalist in favor of remaking English, or that Ludwig Reiner's Stilfibel builds on material acquired through the questionable wartime use of Jewish author Eduard Engel's work. 1 The seeming authorlessness of reference guides suggests that the authors' advice on writing is universal, rather than historically specific. This erasure of authorial presence ironically disservices new writers, who may perceive the guides' esoteric rules as barriers to rather than avenues for their successful integration within an academic community. In this essay, we reflect on how our experiences of creating Sound Writing, a borndigital writing reference guide, enabled us to interrupt modern print reference publishing practices; to reclaim the authority and ownership so often passed off to others in a commercial publication process; and-to the benefit of ourselves as writers and our audience as readers-to refigure the notion of "correctness" itself.

Authorship, 2017

A review of Gaston Franssen, Rick Honings (eds.), Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2017, 282 pp. € 89.

Since the proclamation of his return at the end of the 20 th century, the author reappears in a wide range of different scientific approaches: as a textual category, as a media phenomenon, as a civil person, as the subject of self-fashioning processes, and as an object of external determination.