HERMES 2015: Author, Authorship, and Authority in the Age of Cultural Studies and New Media

International PhD seminar

In the past decades, the interest in the textuality, contexts, readership, historicity or materiality of literary production has overshadowed an important area of literary studies focused on the author, authorship and authority. The present time, marked by the predominance of cultural studies and profound changes effected by the new media, their interactive nature and their impact on our understanding of authenticity, originality and intellectual property, invites us to reconsider the status, meaning and potentialities of author-oriented approaches.
Starting from the Prague Structuralism discussions of authorship in terms of intentionality and “semantic gesture,” Wayne Booth’s “implied author,” E. D. Hirsch’s hermeneutics and Michel Foucault’s concept of a historically developing, discursive “author-function,” the author-oriented approaches can be discussed in view of a number of thematic areas and from various conceptual perspectives, for instance literariness, rhetoric and transformation of humanistic philological agenda, fiction and fictionality, gender studies, identity and psychoanalysis, autobiographical fiction, disease narratives and life writing, postcolonial and diasporic studies, authorship and intellectual property, constructivist approaches, collective authorship, new media studies, ethical turn, autobiographical studies, historical approaches, and literary sociology.