Historical Perspectives on Digital Authorship Renee Hobbs EDC 534
Jul 15, 2015
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.
MO
DER
NISM
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.
PO
STM
OD
ERN
ISM
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