The Near-Death of the Author by John Potts;

Author:John Potts;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Author as Processor

The notion that Barthes could have literally dispatched the legal-economic entity of the author is absurd. In the decades following “The Death of the Author,” the author attained new heights of cultural and economic importance in Western culture. Hollywood cinema in the 1970s vested increased prestige in the director-as-author, celebrating a new generation of film auteurs: Coppola, Scorsese, de Palma, Lucas, Malick. In the 1980s, the publishing industry and media conspired to elevate book authors to celebrity status, approaching the celebrity of pop stars and actors. The adaptation of novels into films and television series further lifted the profile of many authors, both writers of popular fiction such as J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, and authors of literary fiction. In 2007, Lorraine York published a study of three successful authors in her book Literary Celebrity in Canada. Through an examination of the careers of authors Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shield, York analysed the contradictions and difficulties involved in literary fame, including the need to preserve privacy behind the public persona of the celebrity.

Indeed, publishing success and literary celebrity often proved onerous for high-profile authors of literary fiction. In 2001, the novel The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, was selected by television celebrity Oprah Winfrey for her book club, ensuring a huge new readership for the book and enhanced fame for its author. When Franzen expressed unease at the book’s selection, however, his invitation to appear on Oprah’s television show was rescinded. Franzen was roundly criticized for his elitist attitude in rejecting television exposure; nevertheless, the book became a best-seller, perhaps boosted by the Oprah controversy.

But problems such as these for literary authors were barely problems: they were the function of great success in the book industry. They did not herald the death of the author; rather, they attested to the extreme good health of authors, at least best-selling writers. On the other hand, there was one cultural development that did seem to reflect the influence of Barthes’s essay: this was the emergence of the postmodern author.

Postmodern culture gained prominence in the 1970s, particularly in architecture and design, and a postmodern aesthetic was apparent throughout the 1980s and 1990s in visual art, music, literature, and other forms of expression. Postmodernism in general reacted against the singularity, austerity, and avant-garde sensibility of Modernism; in their place were a pluralism of styles, more accessible works, and a recycling or quotation of previous forms, drawing on a data bank of images, sounds, techniques and texts. Postmodern artists took their cue from Andy Warhol in the 1960s: they appropriated existing cultural forms with a cool irony, quoting, fragmenting, and displacing pre-existing texts, which functioned as found objects of culture. This aesthetic of eclecticism was further enabled in the 1980s by the widespread availability of new digital devices, the sampler (used in music) and the scanner (visual art). These digital recording devices were quotation instruments: they made the copying and adaptation of cultural texts easy to achieve by electronic means.

As a result, a

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