This week, I journeyed through a few centuries worth of authorship theory courtesy of Seán Burke’s Authorship (Edinburgh University Press, 1995). My reading list has been updated with the selections I chose to read. I chose my essays with care; it goes without saying (at least to me) that I should read them all, and I intend to. For the purposes of my independent study, however, I chose what I thought would best help me gain an understanding of authorship as it has been discussed to this point.
It is not my intention in this or any subsequent entries to give a summary of what I read (if you want more information, check out the reading list; all of the material I’ve read is readily available and highly anthologized), but instead to discuss the implications on the various theories of authorship to digital culture as I see them so far. Since it would make this and subsequent entries absurdly long (and I haven’t figured out what the WP equivalent to LJ-cuts is yet), I’m not going to go theorist-by-theorist. Rather, I’m going to consider my responses with respect to the three main positions with respect to authorship: author-as-subject, author-as-dead, and attempts at finding the happy medium between those two.
Digital Authorship 