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Content: This module will explore the nature of authorship and the philosophical, social, critical and legal questions it gives rise to. It will focus on the intricacies of the writer’s relation to society and to their chosen material. We will consider ideas of authorship within their changing cultural and historical conditions, ranging from the beginnings of the idea of the modern author as (perhaps) a function of copyright law, mass reproducibility of texts and the rise of Western individualism, to twentieth-century diagnoses of the ‘Death of the Author’ and postcolonial hybridization of the role of the individual author with traditions of orality and collective expression.ÌýÌý

We will also study the conditions of authorship today, when phenomena such as uncreative writing, artificial intelligence, sampling, and hypertext seem to have knocked the creative individual off his or her perch, and yet the task of the writer who wants to be read is more than ever centred on the establishment and maintenance of a personal brand within a competitive attention economy (often – ironically – achieved using social media platforms to which writers have to give up their personal data and the copyright on their words for free). Topics on this module may include, but will not be limited to: the basis of the writer’s authority and entitlement to address their chosen subject matter; the question of writerly and readerly empathy and its ethical complexities; the relation of writing to activism and to social and romantic life; the question of cultural appropriation, especially when writing across differences of race, gender, class and power; and the social consequences of writing and publication, including offence, censorship and legal challenges.

Teaching delivery: Ten lectures, each one hour long, and ten seminars, each one hour long, combined with independent study.

Module aims: his module will provide students with knowledge of the history of authorship, and a practical and theoretical understanding of how the author relates to his or her society. It will develop students’ knowledge and understanding of ethical, practical and legal issues around authorship, subject matter, and the representation of the lives of real or fictional people different to oneself.Ìý

Recommended readings: Along with secondary reading, each week will be focussed around primary texts which dramatise, allegorise or call into question the topic of authorship. These may include, but will not be limited to, selections from the following: Homer, The Odyssey book 8 (Demodokus the bard); Cædmon's Hymn; William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; Henry James, ‘A Private Life’; Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’; Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’; Chinua Achebe, ‘The Writer and his Community’; Luther Blissett, Q; Percival Everett, Erasure; Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station; Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia; Rachel Cusk, Outline; Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing; Jia Tolentino, ‘The I in the Internet’.

This module is taught on the ÐÂÏã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±½á¹ûEast campus in Stratford.Ìý