Perspectives on Authorship and Authority (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Literature and film generate symbolic as well as economic capital. As such, aesthetic productions exist in various contexts following contrasting rules. Which role(s) do authors and filmmakers play in positioning themselves in this conflictive relation? Bringing together fourteen essays by scholars from Germany, the USA, the UK and France, this volume examines the multiple ways in which the progressive (self-) fashioning of authors and filmmakers interacts with the public sphere, generating authorial postures, and thus arouses attention. It questions the autonomous nature of the artistic creation and highlights the parallels and differences between the more or less clear-cut national contexts, in order to elucidate the complexity of authorship from a multifaceted perspective, combining contributions from literary and cultural studies, as well as film, media, and communication studies. Dealing with Authorship, as a transversal venture, brings together reflections on leading critics, exploring works and postures of canonical and non-canonical authors and filmmakers. An uncommon and challenging picture of authorship is explored here, across national and international artistic fields that affect Africa, Europe and America. The volume raises the questions of cultural linkages between South and North, imbalances between the mainstream and the margins in an economic, literary or “racial” dimension, and, more broadly, the relation of power and agency between artists, editors, critics, publics, media and markets.
Authorial Corpographies. Performing Gender and Cultural Authorship
2017
In the last few decades we have witnessed what is undoubtedly a crucial event within Literary Studies: the rebirth of the Author as a central object in theoretical debates – a return which, even if it does not necessarily restore the powers bestowed on it by its progressive sacralization and singularization in Modernity, makes it a prominent star within cultural theory today. Despite such wide interest in reviewing the genealogies, functions, modes of existence, and, ultimately, the cultural and epochal narratives that support the notion of the Author and its multiple incarnations, the “sleeping beauty of Literary Studies”, which is the iconographic representation of the writer, has awoken only in recent years (to use an expression coined by Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Pascal Durand, and Martine Lavaud that appears extremely appropriate for the present issue of Interferences litteraires/Literaire interferenties.)
Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship
Interdisciplinary Barthes, ed. by Diana Knight, 2020
Despite his infamous thesis of the ‘death of the author’ in the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, Roland Barthes developed a conception of authorship that brings together textual and biographical realities, coining the terms biographème and biographologue to describe the relation between the author’s life and work. This was accompanied by a renewed and related interest in photography, as evidenced by his illustrated Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire (1980). Taking this conjunction of authorship and photography as its starting point, this chapter juxtaposes Barthes’s understandings of the author with the evolving photographic iconography of his own authorial persona. It shows that theoretical reflection on authorship was already closely linked with photography and the visual representation of the writer figure in the early Michelet par lui-même (1954), before exploring how this relationship becomes more pronounced and self-reflexive in the 1970s. Analysis of photographic portraits of Barthes, focused on their iconography and style, reveals that the role photography has played in Barthes’s posthumous reception has followed its own dynamics, related to, yet transcending, his highly intentional photographic self-construction.