Authorship’s Wake: Writing After the Death of the Author

Fifty years ago, Roland Barthes declared the death of the author, setting the terms for a continuing critical conversation about authorship. “Authorship’s Wake” unsettles the centrality of Barthes’s essay in the debate by introducing a new set of participants: the authors themselves. Focusing on the generation of contemporary writers who were trained in theory’s critique of the author—Maggie Nelson, Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace—and on the later work of theorists like Barthes and Judith Butler who participated in that critique, “Authorship’s Wake” argues that, even half a century after Barthes’s field-defining essay, the author is a more essential figure than ever in contemporary literary culture. Specifically, I make the case that authorship is at the centre of how writers today are grappling with a range of concrete questions—ethical, aesthetic, political, economic—that far exceed the scope of Barthes’s original intervention. Each of the four chapters focuses on one particular issue at stake in the debate: communication, intention, agency, and labour. The chapters are arranged by scale, from smallest to largest. The first, at the familial level, argues that Nelson’s non-fiction work The Argonauts provides a post-Barthes model for thinking about writing as a form of communication between two people. Against the background of debates about free speech in the university, the second chapter contends that campus narratives by Smith (in On Beauty) and Butler (in Precarious Life) demonstrate both the importance and the limitations of the critique of authorial intention. The final two chapters are more explicitly political: chapter 3 is an analysis of the author as a figure of patriarchal power in contemporary autofiction and in Barthes’s late seminars. And, at the largest scale, chapter 4 (drawing on archival research at the Harry Ransom Center) reads Wallace’s The Pale King as a theory of authorial labour in neoliberal America. “Authorship’s Wake” ultimately makes the case that the best way to understand what it means to be an author today is to read across lines of genre: theory, literature, and texts that defy categorization altogether.Ph.D