Course:LIBR548F/2009WT1/Authorship

Description

Authorship has many definitions which are largely dependent on context – the most common, however, regards an individual or group name associated with the creation of a textual document. This ascription denotes responsibility for a document, both intellectual and legal.

History of Use

First recorded circa 1300, an author was defined as “one who begets; a father, an ancestor.” In the late 14th century, the word took on a different role as representing a person “who gives rise to or causes an action, event, circumstance, state or condition of things” – now obsolete, this usage applied to the builder of any material object and was not textually related. Alternatively, variations on author (auctour, autor, auctores, etc) came to represent “one who sets forth written statements; the composer or writer of a treatise or book.”

The term expanded, originally under the practice of patronage, to include the commissioning agent of a work: one who pays for a document to be written can then also be considered its author. This had remained the dominant definition until the mid-20th century, however 21st century use of the term suggests a convergence of the archaic and the modern form with the advent of computer languages and code, as the text-based script underlying a webpage or program results in the depiction of images and non-textual objects.

Legalities

The modern concept of authorship stems from the responsibility for a document’s contents because those contents could be potentially transgressive or seditious, and to author a text could be understood as a sacrifice of one’s identity that could lead to persecution.

From here began the institution of a complex morass of laws, generally understood as originating with the Statute of Anne in 1710, to protect the rights of authors regarding their works (then for a period of twenty-one years) – prior to this, texts were often printed without heed or even acknowledgement of their creators, with little recourse short of the ‘book curse’ (an inscription damning anyone who would copy or edit a document) to protect them. Authorship in relation to copyright places restrictions on the reproduction and use rights for an author’s work, allowing the author to profit from his creation and avoid the practice of patronage.

Theory

Much literary theory has been devoted to the subject of authorship, primarily beginning with the advent of New Criticism at the onset of the 20th century – critics such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound attempted to divorce the author from his works and look at the pure text, an art object in and of itself. Ironically, in their criticisms they themselves gained notoriety and a cult of personality surrounded their own work.

The attempts to understand authorship in the later 20th century developed largely under the principles of structuralism. While there are many theorists in the field, a central figure is Roland Barthes, whose “Death of the Author” undermines the writer as the creator of a text in light of the fact that it is the reader who interprets it to give it life, in essence recreating it through individual perspective and interpretation – the privileging of the author and the practice of turning to biography to ‘explain’ a work negates a given text’s potentialities, and he importantly writes the often quoted “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”.

Acknowledged as perhaps most significant is Michel Foucault’s contribution, “What is an Author?”, in which he outlines his ‘author function’ that recognizes the author as being an ad hoc construction unrelated to an actual individual who wrote a text. The author here is a fabrication, a function through which texts are constrained. Ultimately, Foucault envisions a world in which the author as a figure is no longer privileged and where it is only the discourse itself that matters – his text is often cited in discussions of open source material.

Modern Usage and Problems of Definition

Current trends in software development have problematized conventional notions of individual or corporate authorship. There are obvious complications regarding authorship when looking at collaborative websites such as Wikipedia, which as of this writing contains more than three million content pages which any person with an internet connection may edit or add to; however questions of online authorship may be far more nuanced than this. One who has posted a blog, for example, may be said to have authored the text, but what of the medium in which it is presented? The structure of a web page (also written) dictates the manner in which a text is received by a reader, so it can be claimed that any document facilitated via a pre-existing program is actually co-authored by the software developer as well.

Certain programs further complicate the definition of authorship: While in the field of physical, book-driven textual production the author can still generally be defined as the individual(s) assigned responsibility for a work, the advent of open source software (being software that is designed to be rewritten to suit particular end-user needs) and Creative Commons licensing (being the right to employ or adapt another’s work for personal purposes) expands authorship to include the end user himself.

Recommended Reading

Foucault, M. (1970). What is an Author? The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. 277-280.

This seminal essay provides a concise history of the author and is generally accepted in the literature as being the starting point for critical engagement in discourses on modern authorship.

Laurenson, D.F. (1969). A sociological study of authorship. The British Journal of Sociology. 20(3). 311-325.

This text offers a broad introduction to the history of authorship as a field of study, tracing the sociological situations out of which authors typically produce their works. Laurenson’s work, written predominantly on the 17th and 18th centuries, acts as a template for understanding modern reconceptualizations of the definition.

North, M. (2001). Authorship and autography. PMLA. 116(5). 1377-1385.

North’s text extrapolates from the dominant critical perspectives on authorship interlaced with a history of copyright and perspectives on “ownership” of a work.

References

“author” (2009). OED Online. Accessed Sept. 23, 2009.

Barthes, R. (1968). The Death of the Author. The Critical Tradition, 3rd Ed. Edited by David H. Richter. NY: Bedford/St. Martins. 2007. 877.

Danet, B. & Bogoch, B. (1992). "Whoever Alters This, May God Turn His Face from Him on the Day of Judgment": Curses in Anglo-Saxon Legal Documents. The Journal of American Folklore. 105(416). 132-165.

Foucault, M. (1970). What is an Author? The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. 277-280.

Laurenson, D.F. (1969). A sociological study of authorship. The British Journal of Sociology. 20(3). 311-325.

North, M. (2001). Authorship and autography. PMLA. 116(5). 1377-1385.

U.S. Copyright Office (2009). Definitions. Retrieved Sept. 23, 2009, from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html.