What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
Perhaps more than any other theorist, Michel Foucault
illustrated the constructed nature of the author figure, arguing
that we should speak of "author functions" rather than authors and
that we should recognize these author functions as part of larger
discourses working to shape and create meaning. What Foucault means
is easily demonstrated with an example that is very close to home:
though I may write a textbook, the "author function" is held by the
publisher, the entity that holds copyright and hence controls the
work's distribution. The larger discursive forces of publishing and
copyright law, in this case, shape and create the meanings I as a
"writer" am allowed to inhabit. At the conclusion of his essay,
"What is an Author?" Foucault pauses, in fact, to ponder some
questions very much like those with which I have begun, suggesting
that "who really spoke?" is more or less beside the point--that it
doesn't matter who really spoke. Instead, Foucault suggests, we should be asking very different questions: "What are the modes of
existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it
circulate, and who can appropriate it. . . " (160). In composition
studies, the "who writes?" question has also been broached, most
noticeably--though I think in almost all cases only superficially--in
the field's attention to collaborative learning and to
collaborative writing practices. Over a dozen years ago, Lisa Ede
and I asked "Why Write . . . Together?"--and we went on to argue
that the romantic concept of authorship as singular and originary--
as the act of an autonomous and stable and uniquely creative
self--effectively hid from view the largely collaborative and
highly dispersed nature of most creative endeavors, from art,
drama, literature, and film to scientific experimentation and
discovery. In Singular Texts, Plural Authors we
explored further the deeply collaborative nature of
most professional writing, and we noted some of the problems
attendant on continuing to try to fit the square peg of
multiple--and multiplicitous--creativity into the round hole of
Romantic, singular "authorship."
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions