Performance

‘Performativity’ became a watchword of cultural theory at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while ideas of performative play and the fluidity of identity have gained much traction in conceptual debates about the experience of being human, large chunks of literary theory still skirt past the question of how to account for actual performances by humans in the real world. What happens when literature stops being just a text on a page and unfolds within a communal setting as a live event? In her chapter, Emily Spiers demonstrates how spoken-word poetry makes particularly apparent an underlying and little conceptualized phenomenon that applies for all literature: the ‘perpetually unstable dynamic of literary connectivity’. Through the frame concept of ‘worlding’ as applied to the Badilisha online poetry platform, the chapter shows how the author–performer and audience share the tangible unfolding of ‘a potentiality of the literary act in time’ at the live scene of a spoken-word performance.

Media

What role does media evolution play in our understanding of authorship? And how do we conceptualize new media authors? This chapter takes us to the production studios of Nollywood in Nigeria, which, because of its size, level of specialization, and, most importantly, the speed at which it operates, is perhaps best approached as an incubator that creates a hothouse atmosphere around artistic and social pressures—pressures that are also present in Western media centres. Emerging from this environment is the ‘super-producer’. In this formidable rival to the literary author, Ukwu detects a modern-day version of the griot, the traditional African storytellers who similarly earned acclaim through their ability to adapt and improvise stories, rather than by the process of ‘authoring’ them.

Death

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ looms large over any attempt to argue for the renewed necessity of incorporating considerations of authorship into the study of world literature. Less than a decade after the publication of ‘Death of the Author’, however, Barthes followed up on it with an autobiography, albeit a deeply unorthodox one. In tracing the fortunes of this autobiography through subsequent editions and translations, the graphic novelist, biographer, and comics expert Benoît Peeters demonstrates how our image of an author, just like our understanding of a literary work according to Barthes’s structuralist understanding, is conditioned by unconscious and even impersonal forces. The simple decision by an editor unfamiliar with the contents of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to exchange a cover illustration in order to make the book more closely conform to genre conventions can have devastating consequences.

Censorship

Eastern Europe has been provocatively defined as ‘that part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued’ (Baruch Wachtel Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006)). This situation arose because of the particular modes of production and circulation of texts brought about by strict censorship and routine state interference in literary matters. This chapter illustrates how this shaped a model of the Russian writer as ‘conscience of the nation’ and opponent of tyranny. It then traces what happens to this model of authorship in the post-Soviet era in the face of different forms of censorship. Despite there no longer being official pre-publication censorship, legislation that limits freedom of expression has created the pervasive phenomenon of ‘self-censorship’ or ‘censorship readiness’ among authors and other agents in the literary field.

Voice

Few terms are as central to the modern understanding of authorship as ‘voice’. Prior to the nineteenth century, authors were rarely, if ever, discussed in terms of having a distinctive voice, but this changed with the rise of the romantic cult of personality. But the question of voice is also fraught with difficult questions of representation, inclusion, and marginalization. In this chapter, the poet and performance artist Ulrike Almut Sandig approaches this question by reminding us that the human voice is a composite phenomenon that requires both the human body and human language. Voice is not constituted by material reality alone and can thus also not be reduced to biology. But neither is it strictly semiotic and is therefore irreducible to the cultural signifiers that constitute gender or racial identities.

Translation

‘We know we have to find the “voice” to write a poem. The voice, not of the author, but if anything, the voice of the poem.’ The esteemed Irish poet Paul Muldoon utters these words in conversation with the German poet, novelist, essayist, and publisher Michael Krüger. In line with its etymological roots, translation is frequently thought of as an act of ‘carrying’ a verbal construct ‘across’ linguistic boundaries, before setting it down in a new language. This is not what Muldoon and Krüger, accomplished translators both, argue for in their discussion of translation captured in this chapter, however. Instead, they urge us to consider that literature becomes multiply authored when it circulates in the world, and that translators, far from being mere shipping agents wrapping a poem in gauze, instead impose their presence upon the work.

Self-Publishing

In the twenty-first century, the barriers to authorship are lower than ever. Whether on blogs or on communal discussion forums, Facebook ‘walls’, or Twitter threads, anyone with access to the internet can fancy him or herself an author. The road to genuine cultural capital, however, still passes through the book, whether in its traditional print format or in the guise of ebooks consumed on Kindles, Nooks, and other electronic devices. Here too, though, a publishing revolution is underway. Thanks to services such as CreateSpace or iUniverse, it is cheaper than ever to self-publish a book, and, thanks to Amazon, it is easier to disseminate one. In this chapter, Jeffrey Di Leo shows how the results of this development are dramatic, both in a numeric sense and in a qualitative one.

Prizes

Literary prizes are among the most powerful ways by which authorship is made visible to the wider world. The vast majority of people do not pay close attention to the literary scene and may be wholly ignorant as to which authors currently count as notable or significant. But a prize announcement can disrupt this status quo, and briefly move a previously obscure name into the spotlight. At least this is true for the handful of literary prizes (among them the Nobel and the Man Booker) that count as truly influential. Yet, Daniel Hahn argues that prizes, aside from reflecting what James F. English has called ‘the economy of prestige’, can actively be used to challenge cultural biases, by making bold statements about what is, and what should be, valuable to a culture.

Nation

Goethe’s 1827 aphorism that ‘national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand’ is cited approvingly in virtually every critical study of the ways authors and literature move about in the world. But is it actually true? As Tobias Boes shows in this contribution, the global literature industry remains subdivided along national lines, with publishers’ catalogues, prize competitions, and trade fairs more or less resembling a ‘cultural Olympiad’. Many twenty-first-century authors struggle with this phenomenon of ‘national exemplification’, as Boes calls it, while other writers derive great commercial benefit from hitching their wagon to the destiny of a national community. This chapter explores whether national exemplification will still be the way forward as we progress into the twenty-first century.

Law

This chapter offers a reminder that ‘authorship’ is far from an abstract interest for actual literary producers. It is what allows authors to file a legal claim to their works, which for them are not only ‘texts’, or examples of ‘discourse’ in the manner discussed by Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, but rather pieces of intellectual property. And intellectual goods—eminently portable, endlessly diverse, and difficult to reverse-engineer—were among the earliest to circulate widely throughout the world. They thus required legal protection on a global scale. Offering a revisionist history of the origins of transnational copyright regimes, this chapter thus draws attention to the role that authors—first and foremost that giant of nineteenth-century literature Victor Hugo—played in ensuring the protection of their names.