The Ecology of Authorial Ascension

Authorship, 2012

Introduction to a Special Topic Section of Authorship.

Revista Transilvania, 2024

This paper develops a world-systems and theoretical analysis of the mechanisms of production and uneven distribution of authoriality in the global literary field. Its title is therefore intentionally duple in its ambiguity: the pursuit of authorship will be shown, simultaneously, as the action of pursuing something as a career (the writer who wishes to become a professional author, for instance, by writing and publishing a text or what I will call the author’s work) and, in parallel, as an activity of a specified and specialized kind (the entire range of elements and processes involved in the social production of authorship or what will be defined as the work of authorship). To this end, the function of world-authorship and its emergent model of ascension will be both situated within the neoliberal regime of capitalist production and the sphere of world literary studies by pursuing the contours and implications of a materialist, posthuman, and ecological approach, while also hinting at its value and processes indexed in terms of forms, figures, functions, and forces. Finally, then, understood within the post-theoretical conjuncture unfolding today, post-authorship will be defined as both a commodity and a world-apparatus.

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.

[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.

Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap 6, 33-45, 2014

The article transposes the text of Roland Barthes' 'Death of the Author', (La Mort de L'auteur 1968), to the arena of happenings in cyberspace, and examines the implications from the point of view of author-reader-text, active in the electronic environment.

Transylvanian Review, 2022

CnCs-uefisCdi, project number Pn-III-P4-id-PCe-2020-2006, within PnCdi III. i n the last couple of decades of the 20 th century, "the death of the author" 1 has been tirelessly haunting the field of literary studies. More often than not, however, this concept and its underlying arguments seem to have been structured around metaphors and lines of reasoning already firmly established in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by seminal thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, 2 and Jacques Derrida. 3 In more recent times, though, portrayals of "the return of the author" 4 have been also thriving, presenting the restorative postulation as an ideational trope able to-at least purportedly-facilitate an entirely new meditation on the topic and to finally move beyond the doom and gloom of poststructuralist deconstruction, in a pragmatic yet ideological proclamation of sorts. It would be facile yet unmistakably true to say that, in the wake of Foucault's work, the field has been framed by genealogical approaches that openly acknowledged and criticized the power relations between individual writers and cultural institutions. 5 Similarly, though, the scientific context has been also dominated, as previously mentioned, by narratives inspired by Roland Barthes' poststructuralist theories as well as Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist approach. Ever since, academics have been endorsing research stratagems that were myopically focused on the play of authorial disappearance and reappearance. 6 Even though this critical framework has been hugely lucrative, recent phenomena such as globalization and digitization, as well as world and systemic approaches to literary studies have decisively altered the structure of our sphere of study. 7 Before describing a new authorial regime and how we can use informational ecologies, I would like to prudently move forward by submitting a few conditional remarks to gauge the issue at hand. The first of these is related to the notion of authorship in what could be called an axiological perspective and it claims that the idea of authorship is invariably the item of some form of contestation. 8 Between Plato's banishment, Wimsatt & Beardsley' anti-intentional stance and Barthes' aforesaid insurrection, comments on authoriality typically entail discursive attitudes somewhat similar to those involved in statements made about

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.

Textual Cultures

accessibility of these productions. I do believe that this nal observation helps the reader to understand the necessity of this kind of study, often considered only for specialists, and that instead is crucial for remembering historical realities that are fundamental for how we today conceive of culture, books, and intellectual goods in general, and for how we transpose them onto different media.