Perspectives on Authorship and Authority

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska; Nelly Strehlau; Katarzyna Więckowska

doi:10.18778/2353-6098.6.01

Authors

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5492-4255
Nelly Strehlau Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7670-7860
Katarzyna Więckowska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3408-3695

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2353-6098.6.01

Keywords:

authorship, authority, death of the author, responsibility, testimony, life-writing

Abstract

This article outlines selected shifts in thinking about authorship and authority that have occurred in literary and cultural studies in the aftermath of Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author, followed by the author’s many revivals. Reconsidering Barthes’s seminal essay and confronting it with Michel Foucault’s query about the author-function, the article comments on Seán Burke’s polemical stance concerning situated authorship. Against these general considerations, several areas in which authorship and authority have been reconceptualized are briefly discussed, referring to the themes addressed in this volume. These areas embrace the problems of representing and using somebody else’s story in visual arts and testimonial theatre, the challenges of individual and cultural situatedness of writing within one’s own output and in reference to more general cultural hauntings as well as the processes of self-formation in the interactions between a variety of texts forming life-writing.

Author Biographies

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska is associate professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Her current research centres on disability studies and drama, trauma studies and hauntology as well as performance, art, site and archive. She is the author of Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013, Toruń) and co-editor of the special issue of Avant on Listening to the Urbanocene. People – Sounds – Cities (2020).

Nelly Strehlau, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Nelly Strehlau is assistant professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Her PhD analysed feminist and postfeminist hauntings in American television series about women lawyers. She is the author of articles dedicated to American and British television and literature, published in English and Polish. Her current research encompasses interrogation of popular culture from the perspective of affect studies and hauntology, with a special interest in women’s authorship and (post)feminism.

Katarzyna Więckowska, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Katarzyna Więckowska is university professor in the Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Her research interests include the contemporary novel in English, ecocriticism, feminist criticism, studies of masculinities, and hauntology. She is the author of Spectres of Men: Masculinity, Crisis and British Fiction (2014), editor of The Gothic (2012) and co-editor of Haunted Cultures / Haunting Cultures (2017).

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