Tradition, the Reader, and the Digital Author

As the title implies, my focus today is upon the implications of digital media with regards to how digital authors and narratives interact with the past as well as adapt to a new medium.  As a continuation of my response to the essays in Seán Burke’s Authorship, I again refer to my reading list for a complete list of the essays and introductory statements I have read thus far.

This focus moves me into stickier theoretical ground than I have yet covered in this blog. Referring specifically to Seán Burke’s section introduction, “The Twentieth Century Controversy”, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”, my intent is to ponder ways in which the digital medium influences our perceptions of subjectivity in writing as well as the role of the reader.  Though I wrote in my previous post that I didn’t intend to handle it this way, this time I am going to examine the three essays individually, using Burke’s section introduction as a springboard.

Autobiography and Digital Temporality

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.