Gaston Franssen, Rick Honings (eds.), Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) (original) (raw)
Literary Celebrity and the Discourse on Authorship in Dutch Literature
Literary celebrity results from a clash between two discursive configurations: literary authorship and popular celebrity. In order to gain an understanding of the contradictions that lie at the heart of literary celebrity, the authorial subjectivity of two Dutch authors are analyzed: Menno ter Braak (1902-1940) and Jan Cremer (1940-). Ter Braak will be shown to personify a classic, high modernist notion of authorship, which entails a resistance to commodification, a critique of personality cult, and a privileging of originality. Cremer, on the other hand, constructs his authorial subjectivity by embracing commerciality, posing as an overtly public individual, and preferring repetition over originality. Yet literary celebrity cannot be understood as a simple inversion of the hierarchical oppositions that characterize the discourse on literary authorship: by analyzing Cremer’s work and reception, I demonstrate that literary celebrity entails a 'staging’ of high modernist authorship
The individual's triumph: the eighteenth-century consolidation of authorship and art historiography
2017
The eighteenth-century consolidation of authorship -apparent in Salon livrets, art criticism, sales catalogues, inventories, the theoretical development of maniera, signing and hanging practices -was crucial to subsequent, nineteenth-century Romantic notions of what constituted individual authorship and to the kinds of eighteenth-century painting that were eventually written into or out of art history. But these developments did not take place unilaterally or overnight. Some of the period's leading painters partook in practices directly contrary to them, most notably through the practice of multiple hands on a single canvas, typically divided according to genre specialization in a longstanding and practical distribution of labour associated with workshop production. The eighteenth-century saw a shift in this longstanding type of painting, however, towards 'collaborations' not between contemporaries in the same city, but between contrasting schools or periods that played on an appreciation of pastiche. Paradoxically, this relied on an understanding of the consolidated author and the connoisseur's ability to differentiate between distinct hands. This article sets out what the shifting terrain of authorship in eighteenth-century France might tell us about much more recent developments in academic discourse around the figure of the author. Fifty years after its publication, Roland Barthes's 'The Death of the Author' (1967) remains a touchstone for current studies of authorship. Here Barthes argued against 'the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture [that] is tyrannically centred on the author' and in favour of an anti-biographical approach that recognizes writing's independent existence (as 'l'écriture'). 1 Michel Foucault responded with his equally pivotal 'What is an Author?' (1969), an essay that pointed to the pragmatic role of the author function as a means of organizing cultural production that already distinguishes between person and writer. 2 Notably, I am tremendously grateful to Charlotte Guichard and Valérie Kobi for their meticulous, insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Since the proclamation of his return at the end of the 20 th century, the author reappears in a wide range of different scientific approaches: as a textual category, as a media phenomenon, as a civil person, as the subject of self-fashioning processes, and as an object of external determination.
Literary Celebrity from Romanticism to the Twenty-first Century
2017
Discourses on authorship have constantly evolved throughout the last few centuries; one of the most notable yet contentious developments in authorship is the author's involvement in celebrity culture. While the Medieval conception of authorship saw the author as a craftsman, the period of Romanticism singled out the author as a distinctive individual of original genius, and the 'author as celebrity' concept began gaining momentum. This trend extended well into the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and authors remain celebrated figures in contemporary society. Much work has been dedicated to the conception of authorship, as well as to the field of celebrity studies. Yet authorship studies and celebrity studies have, in recent years, merged, giving the figure of the author a renewed sense of importance. 'Literary celebrity' as a discipline has therefore been the focus of a number of useful and insightful studies, notably in the works of Joe Moran, Loren Glass, Lorraine York, and Leo Braudy. Yet the specific study of literary celebrity from an extensive historical perspective has been relatively undeveloped. An historical analysis is needed in order to contextualise the celebrity author's place and status in the contemporary mediasphere. This thesis adds to the existing body of work on literary celebrity, addressing a gap in research on the topic by providing an historical background to the celebrity author. In charting the development of the celebrity author from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, my research shows that distinctly Romantic conceptions of authorship have persisted into contemporary society. This is the first work to examine and present an extensive account of literary celebrity from its historical origins to twenty-first century media. In so doing, this thesis illustrates how arguments and assumptions surrounding literary celebrity have been steadily maintained. As a result, literary celebrity remains an important, intriguing topic of discussion, prompting renewed debates relating to modernised conceptions of authorship, writing, reading, popularity, and culture. My research examines the continued importance of celebrity authors in light of their long history. iii Declaration I certify that this work has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution. The work herein is entirely my own, except where acknowledged.
A Genealogy of the Author: from Auctors to commercial Writers
El siguiente artículo pretende hacer una breve reseña genealógica sobre el origen y la evolución del concepto autor en la crítica literaria y su manejo en la producción y distribución de libros y materiales impresos. Se inicia con el análisis de la concepción medieval de auctor, como agente anónimo de la autoridad monárquica en Occidente, y se desemboca en el uso del concepto autor para definir una gran grama de escritores entre los que sobresalen aquellos escritores comerciales que comienzan a surgir en el siglo 18. Además se hace mención al uso y concepción del término autoría y su papel en el desarrollo económico y social de las comunidades occidentales a partir del descubrimiento de América hasta el siglo 19. Brevemente, también, se hace un análisis paralelo de aquellos cambios tecnológicos, filosóficos, estructurales e ideológicos que permitieron la evolución del concepto autor hasta sus usos más contemporáneos.
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.
Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930 (review)
Biography, 2005
Marketing the Author brings together a collection of essays that explore the role of the author as agent in creating his or her own literary personae. Through the lens of biography the ten contributors attempt to historicize Michel Foucault's provocative question: "What is an Author?" The answer, according to Marysa Demoor's "Introduction," can be found in the late nineteenth century, when the status of the author began to shift to accommodate changes in the literary marketplace. The collection makes two significant contributions to the study of intellectual biography. First, it problematizes gender in the creation of both public and private identities. Second, it seeks to redefine the modernist moment by comparing the lived experience of canonical and non-canonical writers. Stephen Greenblatt's highly influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980) inspires the new historicist approach of this collection. His concept of "self-fashioning" directly informs many of the authors in this collection, who essentially apply his Renaissance formulation to the modern period. Within this framework the book attempts, in part, to locate the roots of modernism in late Victorian society. The essays in this collection put the author front and center. Improved literacy and cheaper printing technologies resulted in an increased appetite for print during the late nineteenth century. As a result, authors developed a newfound ability to fashion their own professional and personal identities. This was particularly true it seems for female authors. Elizabeth Mansfield, Talia Shaffer, and Linda K. Hughes all examine women writers who crafted an authorial identity out of the patriarchal world around them. In her study of Emilia Dilke in chapter one, Mansfield concludes that "regardless of their biological sex, Victorian women could modify their intellectual or rhetorical gender" (32). Shaffer's study of Lucas Malet in chapter four attempts "to show how difficult it was to achieve an independent identity" for the late Victorian woman writer (73). At the same time, she demonstrates how Malet attempted "to invent a different model of female authorship" (74) by among other things, adopting a masculinist personae and "refus(ing) to be a sequel" to the career of her more famous father, Charles Kingsley (88). In chapter seven, Hughes explores the career of Rosamund Marriott Watson, and argues that women writers, in this case a poet, could be resourceful within the bounds of a pervasive and highly restrictive Victorian gender ideology.
Introduction: re-viewing literary celebrity
Celebrity Studies, 2016
What is literary celebrity, and why should people working in other areas of either literary or celebrity studies care about it? Our answer is threefold. First, as a socially urgent topic (how authors are recognised and valued in the western world), it is something of a lifeline to literary studies, which, towards the end of the twentieth century, came dangerously close to running aground on self-regarding analyses of self-regarding texts (Jameson 1991, Eagleton 2003, English 2010, Felski 2015). Alongside postcolonial and feminist studies, as well as recent trends in queer theory and ecocriticism, literary celebrity has offered a bridge to those scholars who want to think literature back into the bigger picture of society. Seminal works by, for example, Moran (2000), Glass (2004) and Jaffe (2005) set it out as a particular, historical response to the emergence of mass culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Subsequent studies have argued with various different aspects of this premise: whether this is to contest the moment and material mode of literary celebrity's genesis (Mole 2007, 2009) or the unacknowledged gender bias underpinning the very concepts of 'fame' and 'celebrity' (Hammill 2007, Weber 2012). Surveying the by now substantial body of research on literary celebrity in 2014, Ohlsson et al. (2014) argued for yet greater diversification of the field of study: to include all forms of fiction, and to differentiate between literary contexts across time and in various geopolitical spaces. This necessarily brief overview of the field brings us to the second point about literary celebrity's significance: it is increasingly obvious that literary celebrity constitutes less a specific phenomenon within the history of literature than a necessarily multipronged methodological approach to the study of literature. Thinking about issues of reputation and writers' relations with readers focuses the critical theorist on the innate constituents of literature: authors, readers, texts, ideas of affect, representation and self-fashioning. But it does so in such a way that also permits the study of literature to go beyond itself and to ask how ideas of literary value intersect with other predominant notions of social and economic value at any one time or place; to consider the material and pecuniary aspects of the book trade alongside the aesthetic techniques evolved in anticipation of a work's wider appropriation; and to take seriously the demonstrable relationship between the author's literary work and the marginalia of everyday life (as Foucault [2000, p. 207], in the case of Nietzsche's laundry lists, implicitly does not). Looking at the ways in which authors' lives jostle with their works, and how both their lives and works become inserted into other, non-literary discourses, requires a multi-faceted, multi
A Theory of Early Modern Authorship
In Search of the Culprit
In 16 th-century vernacular literature, authorship is not yet as clearly defined as in later centuries. It is still characterised by the presence of degrees of authorship and makes use of the various concepts of anonymity. Authority and the fictional status of a work are discussed whenever instances of authorship are mentioned in the text. This practice, of course, comes with consequences for the text itself. This chapter will focus on one outstanding example of dealing with authorship: the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587). Though it is a work of imaginative literature, it integrates factual sources with literary invention. The text does not explicitly discuss the circumstance that its parts have been taken from somewhere else and transformed into something else. It does, however, try to emphasise its origin with a single author, namely the protagonist himself.
Literary celebrity reconsidered
Celebrity Studies, 2014
The ongoing celebritisation of society not only comprises 'celebrity sectors' such as entertainment and sports, but also literature. As in other cultural fields, the commodities to be sold-books-are marketed using the 'personalities' directly connected to them by authors appearing on television shows or being selected for feature articles. The aim of the article is to point out limitations to the theoretical framework used in the study of literary celebrity. We argue for a differentiation in the use of the concept of celebrity in literary studies in three respects. Firstly, there should be a differentiation regarding author's cultural capital. In contrast to the general tendency in celebrity studies to focus on popular culture, in literary studies the application of the theory has been limited to the most prestigious areas of the literary field. Consequently, a broadening of the perspective is necessary: authors of trade fiction may be conceived of as literary celebrities too. Secondly, there is a need for geographical differentiation, since the scope of influence of literary celebrities may vary significantly. Thirdly, we will argue for a diachronic differentiation that takes into account the changing functions and uses of a celebrity author over time. The main example, the Swedish novelist Selma 2 Lagerlöf, shows the necessity of a stronger focus on the functions of literary celebrities, for instance in the construction of cultural and national identities. Furthermore, celebrity is important for a more comprehensive literary history and for the complex concept of literary value.
The Medieval “Author”: An Idea Whose Time Hadn’t Come?
The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, 2006
The term "author" has become so much a part of our vocabulary and literary attitude that it's natural to feel that it must always have been so. As Heidegger says:"The artist is the origin of the work.The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." 1 Since the Renaissance, the author has been conceived as the professional "literary figure" who writes works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms to make an "original" creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were bound to consider the work and the author together. Opinions have varied radically as to the extent of the author's being qua individual that may find expression in his work. What has not been questioned-at least until recently-is the fact of there being an authorial presence behind the work and recoverable through it. T. S. Eliot, for example, argued that the author is someone who comes to grips not with a personal psyche, but with a poetic medium, which he calls "tradition": [T]he poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. 2 Kenneth Burke argues, on the other hand, that it may be precisely the discovery of his "personality," or at least aspects of it, that the poet V. Greene (ed.
Perspectives on Authorship and Authority
Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
This article outlines selected shifts in thinking about authorship and authority that have occurred in literary and cultural studies in the aftermath of Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author, followed by the author’s many revivals. Reconsidering Barthes’s seminal essay and confronting it with Michel Foucault’s query about the author-function, the article comments on Seán Burke’s polemical stance concerning situated authorship. Against these general considerations, several areas in which authorship and authority have been reconceptualized are briefly discussed, referring to the themes addressed in this volume. These areas embrace the problems of representing and using somebody else’s story in visual arts and testimonial theatre, the challenges of individual and cultural situatedness of writing within one’s own output and in reference to more general cultural hauntings as well as the processes of self-formation in the interactions between a variety of texts forming ...
Authors and other Criminals: Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Literature Compass, 2004
In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship from the perspective of the cultural, regional, and national conflicts that led to modern authorship's emergence. Arguing that the figure of the modern author arose in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, not from an uncontested common moral and ethical center, but from a maelstrom of conflicting practices and standards emanating from an amazingly varied array of national, class, and gendered sources, she suggests that ‘literary scandals’ played a special role in the construction of a nationalized author in that they brought high, low, and official juridical culture together to construe what authorship would come to mean in the modern world.