Authorship Contested: Cultural Challenges to the Authentic, Autonomous Author

by Amy E. Robillard (editor)

This volume explores a dimension of authorship not given its due in the critical discourse to this point—authorship contested. Much of the existing critical literature begins with a text and the proposition that the text has an author. The debates move from here to questions about who the author is, whether or not the author’s identity is even relevant, and what relationship she or he does and does not have to the text. The authors contributing to this collection, however, ask about circumstances surrounding efforts to prevent authors from even being allowed to have these questions asked of them, from even being identified as authors. They ask about the political, cultural, economic and social circumstances that motivate a prospective audience to resist an author’s efforts to have a text published, read, and discussed. Particularly noteworthy is the range of everyday rhetorical situations in which contesting authorship occurs—from the production of a corporate document to the publication of fan fiction. Each chapter also focuses on particular instances in which authorship has been contested, demonstrating how theories about various forms of contested authorship play out in a range of events, from the complex issues surrounding peer review to authorship in the age of intelligent machines.

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 8, 2015

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I have an essay in this book. Even still, I think it's an interesting and useful volume. Each chapter offers a kind of a case study of a situation in which it's not clear who has "authority" over a certain text—who wrote it, who owns it, who can circulate it, whether the text seems authentic or fraudulent, and so on. The authors write from the perspective of critics, writers, activists, and teachers. As a writing teacher myself, I was especially drawn to some nice pieces with a pedagogical slant: Val Perry on the differences between unedited and edited journals (sometimes the latter seem faked); Matt Hollrah on fostering a "gift economy" in an academic culture consumed by anxieties about plagiarism. But there is also a striking piece by one of the editors Amy Robillard, on the emotional strains of asking an anonymous referee write a "blind" response to an anonymous submission to an academic journal.