Temptation, trash and trust: the authorship and authority of digital texts
| Type of publication: | Misc |
| Citation: | 153 |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Month: | 2 |
| Note: | Baynne 23-25 February 2005 - Temptation k, 27.05.2007 |
| URL: | http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/ice2... |
| Abstract: | My paper draws on the story of the epitaph on the grave of the poet Keats, and the concept of a textuality which is 'written in water'. The allegory relates not only to the themes of mutability and fluidity in digital text, but also to the ironic claim to anonymity of the inscription desired by Keats, which refuses the engraving of his name in favour of the cryptic, anonymising, 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'. As I will show, Keats' friends were disturbed by this spectre of authorial anonymity, by Keats' apparent desire to make a ghost of the figure of the author, the individualised, creative Romantic genius. The disquietude experienced by Keats' friends is, as I will show, shared by learners and teachers confronting the issues of authorship and textual authority in the digital realm. The ways in which texts are produced and shared in internet spaces presents a challenge to our traditional ways of thinking about authorship. Though it would be a mistake to overdetermine their relationship, the 'reconfiguring' of the author enabled through digitisation and networked computing may be related to the reconceptualisation of the figure of the author by poststructuralism. In this paper I turn to Foucault and his concept of the 'author function' (Foucault 1988), and to this idea as it may be reinterpreted in terms of 'digital' and 'analogue' authorship (Poster 2001). The paper focuses on how the shift in the way in which authorships are constituted in digital space disturbs the means by which online learners and teachers have traditionally positioned themselves as readers. It looks at examples of how learners and teachers speak about issues of authority, legitimacy and trust within electronic, as opposed to print, text. I use interview extracts to demonstrate the ways in which learners and teachers appeared to resist digital authorship and altered forms of 'readerly imagination', continuing to look to the figure of the known and knowable author as the guarantor of authenticity and reliable academic knowledge. References Foucault, M. (1977) 'What is an Author? trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127. Poster, M. (2001). What's the matter with the internet? Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. |
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| Added by: | [ADM] |
| Total mark: | 0 |
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