Abstract
This chapter uses Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” to interrogate attitudes to originality within the academy. That authors are not ex nihilo originators of their own ideas has long been a commonplace, but critics have barely considered its implications for their own professional practice as authors of literary criticism; concepts of copyright, citation and plagiarism remain firmly embedded in the structures that govern academic culture. This chapter argues for redefining scholarship in terms of performance rather than ownership. More generally, it proposes a new analytical framework to describe the relationship between an increasingly empowered readership and traditional conceptions of literary authority and intention, while acknowledging some of the factors likely to inhibit these developments.
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Notes
- 1.
This idea had already been expressed in Julia Kristeva’s 1966 essay, “Word, Dialogue and Novel”: “any text is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1980, p. 66). Kristeva, in turn, attributed the insight to Mikhail Bakhtin —a cascade that neatly illustrates the point being made by all three writers.
- 2.
The four funding bodies are HEFCE (England), HEFCW (Wales), the Scottish Funding Council and the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland).
- 3.
In fact, the Disney Company logo, which was first used twenty years after Walt Disney’s death, bears little resemblance to the signature used by Disney himself (Big Cartoon Database 2014).
- 4.
This occurs at several points in the series, but particularly in the opening episode of the third season, “The Empty Hearse” (2014), which dramatises some of the fan speculations about the resolution of the previous season’s cliff-hanger ending.
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Butler, C. (2018). All Our Own Work: Originality and Creative Reading. In: Literary Studies Deconstructed. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90475-7_5
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