Posts Tagged ‘Authorship’
Recently read: Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey.
I have to thank Dr. Bluemel for recommending this book (well, to Toni, but I was standing next to them!). It proved to very helpful in further tempering my understanding of intertextuality, Barthes, and the “decentering” of authors. It is a brief but extremely useful text for any number of scholarly fields.
His death is, in a sense, another nail in the coffin of a kind of literary vanguard. I can understand why this blog’s readership might relish, openly or in private, the extinction of these writers, particularly given the old school’s knee-jerk aversion to new methodologies and shifting boundaries. By 2006, as the sensationally-titled “The End of Authorship” attests, it seemed that Updike opposed progress in the humanities more than he furthered it. The voguish sentiment, for better or worse, was disdain for his belletristic ways.
This week’s video is Black Flag from the same show the Saccharine Trust footage was taken from. You’ll want to especially pay attention to Greg Ginn’s ridiculous guitar playing.
Recently read: The Rise Of The Novel by Ian Watt.
Dr. Bluemel putting this book on our syllabus last spring ended up working out really well for me in two ways. First, it offered a lot of guidance to my reading, and rereading, at the time of the novels of Richardson, Defoe, and Fielding. Second, the second chapter gave me some important background information about the history of publication and authorship for my MA thesis.
The romantic narrative in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler isn’t that compelling for me. However, I have to say a few passages do move me in very personal ways. This passage reminds me of some experiences I have had the past few years:
You’re hurt. This hunt excites you because you’re pursuing it with her, because the two of you can experience it together and discuss it as you are experiencing it. Now, just when you thought you had reached an accord with her, an intimacy, not so much because now you also call each other tu, but because you feel like a pair of accomplices in an enterprise that perhaps nobody else can understand.
What is it about authorship issues that makes me think of romance? Hmm.
Recently read: S/Z by Roland Barthes.
I had been meaning to read S/Z for a number of years, going back to the spring of 2004 when I was beginning to engage with Barthes for my senior seminar paper on Borges. In this book Barthes offers a book length discussion of the differences between “writerly” and “readerly” texts plus his concept of the lexia.
S/Z, especially in Barthes’ opening remarks, really nails a lot of what I perceive about authorship, reading, and the evolution of the writerly text towards electronic literature. All of this will be useful for my MA thesis which, after taking a break from research for a number of weeks, I am starting to dive back into.
My favorite part of S/Z however is in Richard Howard’s preface. To conclude, I will leave you with Howard’s totally right on thoughts about exposing the myths of what he refers to as “instinctive enjoyment”:
As long as our enjoyment is-or is said to be-instinctive it is not enjoyment, it is terrorism. For literature is like love in La Rochefoucauld: no one would ever have experienced it if he had not first read about it in books. We require an education in literature as in the sentiments in order to discover that what we assumed-with the complicity of our teachers-was nature is in fact culture, that what was given is no more than a way of taking. And we must learn, when we take, the cost of our participation, or else we shall pay much more. We shall pay our capacity to read at all.
Barthes’ definition of a text is “a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (146) Authorship is the culmination of capitalistic ideology which treats authors as Special and Very Important People. This kind of capitalistic tyranny wants to unite the author with their work and make them insuperable (143). The removal of the author completely transforms the text. The modern scriptor has their birth at the same time as the text does. In electronic literature, the reader’s engagement with the text births a new version of it each time, depending on how they work with the interface. The next is reborn each time. A piece of electronic literature may have an author, but their role in the work is irrelevant. The reader, the modern scriptor, is the person who holds everything together.
Allen’s Intertextuality is a great overview of the field. Primarily he engages with Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes. There are many useful quotes for my own work . Barthes’ definition of a text “A text…is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (10) For Toni and I’s symposium presentation Simon Denith’s “Dictionaries are the graveyards of languages” will be useful (18). As will Bakhtin’s “language is always in a ceaseless flow of becoming.” (18)
Also useful is the discussion of Barthes’ theories about authorship and how they relate to capitalistic concerns. For my own uses, relating this to electronic literature is helpful. As Allen notes, the “name of an author allows (a) work to be an item of exchange value.” (71) Without a centered text, the reader of electronic literature becomes a writer of the text through their engagement with it. Electronic literature needs multiple rereading sessions from a variety of angles to “complete” the text (but do you even need to really?). The move away from a centralized text towards the decentralized, writerly, form which hypertext fiction offers is a threat to capitalism, which desires disposable, throwaway literature and thought. A book reread is one less sold.
Zotero Library
