Authorship From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader

by Burke, Seán

• ISBN13: 9780748606184
• ISBN10: 0748606181
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-31
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

This reader provides a solid theoretical base for all those encountering the 'author' debate for the first time. It presents key readings from the main writers on authorship, including pieces from Plato, Descartes, Shelley, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Borges, and puts the authorship debates into historical context.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction: Reconstructing the Author	xv
Part 1: The Aesthetic and Textual Debate
Section 1: Changing Conceptions of Authorship	3	(60)
from Iron	13	(6)
Plato
from The Republic	19	(4)
Plato
`The Singnificance of the Medieval Theory of Authorship'	23	(8)
A. J. Minnis
from An Apology for Poetry	31	(6)
Sir Philip Sidney
from 'Conjectures on Original Composition'	37	(6)
Edward Young
from 'A Defence of Poetry'	43	(8)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
from `Crisis in Verse'	51	(3)
Stephane Mallarme
`Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming'	54	(9)
Sigmund Freud
Section 2: The Twentieth-century Controversy	63	(80)
`Tradition and the Individual Talent'	73	(8)
T. S. Eliot
`Literature and Biography'	81	(9)
Boris Tomasevskij
`The International Fallacy'	90	(11)
W. K. Wimsatt Jr.
Monroe C. Beardsley
`Criticism and the Experience of Interiority'	101	(7)
Georges Poulet
`from Validity in Interpretation	108	(9)
E. D. Hirsch Jr
`The Exorbitant. Question of Method`	117	(8)
Jacques Derrida
`The Death of the Author'	125	(6)
Roland Barthes
`A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis'	131	(12)
Harold Bloom
Part 2: The Politics of Authorship
Section 1: Feminism and the Authorical Subject	143	(70)
from the Madwoman in the Attic	151	(11)
Sandra M. Gilbert
Susan Gubar
`Castration or Decapitation?'	162	(16)
Helene Cixous
`Feminist Tracks'	178	(15)
Alice Jardine
`Changing the subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader'	193	(20)
Nancy K. Miller
Section 2: Ideologies and Authorship	213	(88)
`Writing For One's Age'	223	(7)
Jean-Paul Sartre
`Creation and Production'	230	(3)
Pierre Macherey
from `What Is an Author?'	233	(14)
Michel Foucault
from `What Was an Author?'	247	(16)
Molly Nesbit
`Author'	263	(14)
Donald E. Pease
`Postcolonialism and the Author: The Case of Salman Rushdie'	277	(8)
Maire ni Fhlathuin
`The Ethics of Signature'	285	(7)
Sean Burke
`Taking Philosophy Seriously'	292	(9)
Richard Rorty
Part 3: Writing the Self	301	(39)
from Essays	309	(3)
Michel de Montaigne
`Second Meditation'	312	(8)
Rene Descartes
`Why I Am a Destiny'	320	(8)
Friedrich Nietzsche
`Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'; 'Kafka and His Precursors'; 'Everything and Nothing'; 'Borges and I'	328	(12)
Jorge Luis Borges
Index	340