Author/Auteur

The concept of authorship seemed uncomplicated, or was at least unexplored, until the second half of the twentieth century; since then it has become the site of much theoretical discussion. Modern literary criticism has not simply underwritten the authority of authors. The American New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in their Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren, 1938), ruled out the study of biographical materials as a substitute for study of the literary text itself. They raised the issue of whether the reconstruction of an author's intention from the text was at all possible, and, if possible, whether it was even relevant. Soon after, in a famous essay entitled “The intentional fallacy,” the American critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1954) forbade critics to refer to authorial intentions in the analysis of literature, arguing that the literary work itself contained all the information necessary for its understanding and that appeals to authorial intention or biography (disparaged as “Shakespeare's laundry list”) were at best irrelevant, at worst downright misleading

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• The verbal icon

  William K Wimsatt•The verbal icon•1954

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• Actor network theory and after

  John Hassard, John Law•Actor network theory and after•1999

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