"Authors and Authorship on the Internet"

Beskrivelse

Book signings, book readings, and Q&A sessions – situations where writers and their fans interact face to face – have formed important aspects of literary culture at least since the 19^th century. While those activities are intended to fuel the sales of books, they also work on our system of beliefs by sustaining the notion that has been variously labelled the charismatic ideology (Bourdieu), the Author (Barthes), or the author function (Foucault), i.e. the idea that the author is the origin and end of the meaning of a literary work.

Increasingly, encounters between authors and their fans take place via the Internet. Publishing houses and individual writers have created websites, blogs, etc. with this purpose in mind. Perhaps, the desire to link reader and writer electronically culminated with  Margaret Atwood’s recent invention, LongPen, “[…] the world’s first long distance, real pen and ink signing device (…)” (). More particularly, LongPen is a gadget that enables authors to engage their readers in book signing events over the Internet. It allows authors to communicate with their fans through audio and video while signing the individual copies they have brought for the occasion. While LongPen is a technology designed for the 21^st century author keen on promoting his wares as effectively as possible, it also attempts to maintain those ideas of authorship critiqued by Bourdieu, Barthes, and Foucault. Offering a way for authors of supplementing their work with their visual, spoken, and written presence, LongPen confirms the centrality of the author as the producer of value and meaning.

In this paper, I take a closer look at some of the models of authorship that are circulating on the Internet in the shape of websites, blogs, or technologies such as LongPen and show how they, in spite of their novelty are linked to very traditional ways of thinking about authors.