Professor Renee Hobbs explores historical perspectives on authorship in a fully-online graduate seminar in digital authorship.

1. Historical Perspectives on
Digital Authorship
Renee Hobbs
EDC 534

2. Competing Conceptualizations of
Authorship
Lone Wolf Collaborator

3. Authors are
the guardians
of collective
memory
Oral poets shape old tales into new forms.

4. Romantic Aesthetics
Authors are autonomous individuals with vivid
sensations and a powerful overflow of
spontaneous feelings that get articulated
through creative expression.

5. At any moment, the reader is ready
to turn into a writer.
-Walter Benjamin

6. Authors working in the modernist tradition expressed their personal subjective
understandings, feelings and drives, exposing the irrationality at the roots of a
supposedly rational world.
MODERNISM

7. AUTHORIAL INTENT

8. Developing from the
French New Wave
cinema of the 1950s,
the idea is that film
directors have a
distinctive visual
style, technical
competence and
consistent themes or
interior meanings.

9. NEW CRITICISM
Formal analysis
of the structure
of a work of art
is accomplished
by close reading
that does not
interrogate
authorial
intention or
reader response.

10. POSTMODERNISM
BARTHES
Death of the Author
FOUCAULT
What is an Author?

11. The text does not release a single
meaning, the “message” of the author,
but that a text is rather a “tissue of
citations” born of a multitude of
sources in culture
-Barthes, 1978

12. In the late age of print, tensions between the
authority of the author and the empowerment of the
reader have become part and parcel of the writing
space
--Bolter, 2001

13. At the core of authorship is the process of making choices about the
structure and content of media elements within the constraints of a
particular medium. Different discourse communities have different notions
of how much of a contribution in structure and content results in authorship.

14. Authorship is about
control, power and the
management of
meaning and of people
as much as it is about
creativity and
innovation.

15. LEARN MORE
Rebecca Moore Howard’s Bibliographies on
Theory and History of Authorship