Hmmm….there is silence and then crickets chirping in my head when I think about what to write in response to our current blog discussion.
So, last Monday, I sat quakin’ in my boots, for fear that I would be called upon to discuss Plato, Aristotle and Quintilian (philosophy not my forté) – thank you T for bringing the whole darn book to class. (I wish I knew who is who with respect to screen names.) It appeared to me that on one side of the literary smackdown, B and T felt strongly that a virtuoso writer is the creator and owner of his/her work. What I heard T and B debating was that a. there will never be another Shakespeare, b. each author is unique and a few are great, c. great authors are geniuses born and deserve the credit and the money (per the FanFic debate). Our Woodmansee reading comes to mind here. (let me know!)
On the other side of the ring, M was discussing the distinctions for her between authorship and originality. What I heard her saying was that she could draw a stick figure while someone else simultaneously drew a stick figure on the other side of the planet. Whoever got to the copyright office fast enough would win the rights and that nothing out there is truly original. When I was reading Barthes for this week, the following quote reminded me of M’s debate -
“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning(the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
"The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (from Image, Music, Text, 1977)
The readings we had for this week have prompted me to consider a generic definition for authorship. It seems to me that culture dictates what an author is. Whatever the politics, economics, theologies, philosophies and technologies are of a culture at a certain point in time, define what an author is. First, we examined the classical idea of authorship as something that is divinely inspired or based upon a template of excellence. Now, we are reading about the romantic author. The birth of the author [copyright] seemed to be about putting food on the table. The death of the author seemed to be about having a full belly and contemplating how important/unimportant the role of the author is for the reader in understanding her work. The reading stated that the author cannot be separated from the fabric of his culture. The reader’s experience is more important than the author’s is.
So, what does that mean for today? I enjoy hearing the debates in class, because I see how complicated it is to wrangle a clear definition of authorship and to know where the line is between the reader and writer especially with a relatively new, digital, and instantaneous medium.
I would love to hear what other people are thinking about authorship and feedback about last Monday’s discussion.
humbly,
anna
p.s. does anyone in technology land know how to get the irritating ask.com toolbar off my browser?
3 comments:
The concern that I have is that the characters that writers claim they own are not real.
The amount of hubris involved in the "I own the characters I write" is, frankly, astounding. The author is one person in a string of idea/meaning transfers. Author-->Editor-->Publisher-->Reader. They no more own my interpretation of those characters than they own my dog.
What the characters are, really, are simplified representations of people. They are not real, no matter how much of a genius the author may be.
anna, I think you gave a good summary of where we've come so far. Last week we discussed the classical conception of the author and how it differs from our own, and how economic interests have a place in the equation with copyright issues. As for myself, I think hints of the classical conception are still with us- genuis, creativity, the ability to synthesize experience into narrative form. The viability of the classical conception for our age can be demonstrated by the very fact of how strange Barthes and Foucault still sound to our ears, indicting and dismissing the creator of the text. When will we ever get the author "right"?
For myself, I see in authorship a "give and take" dynamic, where the author recieves money and prestige in return for giving ideas or stories to the culture, for the advance of society.
BTW- depending on your browser, you can usually get rid of toolbars and bookmarklets by going into Tools > Preferences and disabling the toolbar in mind. If that fails, the best move is to get a better browser. I'm partial to Opera.
I've been thinking about the argument of whether or not someone else could have written Darwin's treatise, or whether or not something is truly unique to an individual. I think that part of the issue for me is the conflation of the ideas that in order to be an author you must produce something that is truly original and unique to you, and the idea that authorship is defined, to a certain extent, by who got there first.
While no one may have chosen every word that Darwin did, the concepts that are addressed within his text could absolutely have been written by someone else. I don't know that we can separate the two. Either creation itself makes you the author of something, or we have to change the definition to something that is absolutely unique -- something that I don't think actually exists.
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