Authorship: Not so hard to grasp, really

A few thoughts on the subject of authorship, provoked mostly by our readings:

An awareness of intertextuality is not the same thing as authorship. Film is an inherently intertextual medium, and individual films are constructed through the collaboration of writers, actors, photographers, designers, editors, composers, and technicians. We recognize the screenwriter as the author of the screenplay, the composer as the author of the score, the actor as the author of the performance, and the director as the author of the film.

Frankly, I (and, I would submit, most of us) don't find the concept of authorship nearly as problematic as some of our theorists would like. I fail to see how the idea that our conception of authorship is comparatively recent changes anything -- it is still OUR conception. Besides which, I would also like to suggest for the record that, while the concepts of originality, individualism, and spontaneity ARE relatively recent additions to our notions of authorship, the concept of individual or autonomous authorship has been with us for just about as long as human expression itself. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides are all unproblematically recognized by Aristotle as the autonomous authors of their respective works -- interesting considering that Homer's epics were most probably composed orally as part of a long oral tradition and Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were all playwrights who wrote for performance, to say nothing of the fact that every single one of them was dealing with well-known stories that were ancient even to them (all four of them, for example, dealt with the events and characters of the Trojan War).

And it's this very fact that gets at the heart of how unproblematic authorship really is: nobody in fifth-century Athens cared about the STORY, which was recognized as public property; what mattered to them was the individual expression or treatment of the story. Believe me, Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Electra are very different plays, though they deal with exactly the same characters and exactly the same events. What makes them different is the autonomous author who gave individual expression to the story.

My point? No one is suggesting that writing or authorship happens in a vacuum -- obviously writers are all influenced by other writers and creators (which is not the same thing as collaboration). But if we do not teach our students that there is a difference between giving original expression to commonly held facts and ideas (whatever the source of those ideas might be) and claiming someone else's expression of those ideas as your own, we are not only setting them up to fail, we are also quite simply refusing to do the jobs those very students trust us to do.