What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
The questions I pose in the title of this web are
ones that have engaged theorists of reading and writing for at
least thirty years now. Since Roland Barthes announced "The Death
of the Author" in 1968, the notion of authorship (the "who
writes?") has come under increasingly intense scrutiny. In literary
studies, Martha Woodmansee has powerfully,
and repeatedly,
demonstrated the degree to which our emphasis on the "who" in "who
writes?" is a product of a Romantic conception of authorship that
has worked to privilege the "author" as owner of intellectual
property, property that could be commodified and bartered in the
emerging system of industrial capitalism. And a growing number of
literary scholars are challenging the dominance of what Woodmansee
calls the "author construct," demonstrating
the web of political,
social, linguistic, and ideological forces in which any seemingly
unique "author" moves.
Next
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions