Historical Perspectives on Digital Authorship

Renee Hobbs

EDC 534

Competing Conceptualizations of Authorship

Lone Wolf Collaborator

Authors are the guardians of collective

memory

Oral poets shape old tales into new forms.

Romantic Aesthetics

Authors are autonomous individuals with vivid sensations and a powerful overflow of spontaneous feelings that get articulated through creative expression.

At any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

-Walter Benjamin

Authors working in the modernist tradition expressed their personal subjective understandings, feelings and drives, exposing the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.

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AUTHORIAL INTENT

Developing from the French New Wave cinema of the 1950s, the idea is that film directors have a distinctive visual style, technical competence and consistent themes or interior meanings.

NEW CRITICISMFormal analysis of the structure of a work of art is accomplished by close reading that does not interrogate authorial intention or reader response.

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BARTHESDeath of the Author

FOUCAULTWhat is an Author?

The text does not release a single meaning, the “message” of the author,

but that a text is rather a “tissue of citations” born of a multitude of

sources in culture

-Barthes, 1978

In the late age of print, tensions between the authority of the author and the empowerment of the reader have become part and parcel of the writing space

--Bolter, 2001

At the core of authorship is the process of making choices about the structure and content of media elements within the constraints of a particular medium. Different discourse communities have different notions of how much of a contribution in structure and content results in authorship.

Authorship is about control, power and the management of meaning and of people as much as it is about creativity and innovation.

LEARN MORE

Rebecca Moore Howard’s Bibliographies on Theory and History of Authorship