Literary authority and authorship

El restringido y particular modo con que Lope empleó ciertos términos ("do, "vide" y "vido") permite identificar pasajes de diferentes comedias que a todas luces fueron manipulados por una mano ajena al poeta, probablemente la de los directores de compañías. El presente artículo reflexiona acerca de la validez y los límites del análisis del vocabulario como método para abordar la autoría de las comedias del Siglo de Oro, así como sobre la necesidad de acometer su estudio a la hora de elaborar una edición crítica.

What happens when writers of literature write about literature? From book reviews, interviews, and talks at seminars and writers’ festivals, to prefaces, manifestos, handbooks and academic essays, there is no shortage of commentary from writers about their craft. Writers often claim to be concerned with the practice of writing rather than theories of literature, with the creative process rather than the literary product. It might thus be reasonable to argue that writers offer a practical knowledge of the craft of writing which cannot be gained from literary criticism and theory. However, when writers talk about their craft they are also inevitably articulating the theories which to varying degrees of reflexivity underpin their creative practice. The pronouncements of writers, then, in whatever mode of address they employ, must also be seen as contributions to the field of literary criticism.

In 2011, the Netherlands was invited to be the guest of honour at the Beijing
Book Fair. This fair attracted controversy that revealed the tensions that
exist between nation branding, public diplomacy, and literary autonomy:
while its sponsor, the Ministry of Culture, regarded the fair as a perfect
marketing opportunity, Amnesty International used the occasion to
protest repression in China. Dutch authors invited to participate in the fair
forged an alternative position by emphasizing their status as autonomous
artists. However, an analysis of the debate in the Dutch media shows that
both the Ministry, Amnesty International, the Dutch Foundation for
Literature, and many authors interpreted the contact between Chinese
and Dutch authors as a clash between an open(-minded) culture and a
closed one.

"The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson argues that the omniscient narrator, long considered a relic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, has reemerged as an important feature of contemporary British and American literary fiction. It further argues that the development of contemporary omniscience can be situated in relation to ongoing anxieties about the novel’s decline of cultural authority in the age of digital media. In this context the book identifies and classifies new modes of omniscient narration that are neither nostalgic revivals nor parodic critiques of classic omniscience, but the result of experimentations with narrative voice in the wake of postmodern fiction.

To address this phenomenon, the book reformulates existing definitions of literary omniscience, shifting attention away from questions of narratorial knowledge and toward omniscient narration as a rhetorical performance of narrative authority that invokes and projects a historically specific figure of authorship. Through a study of fiction by authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Martin Amis, Rick Moody, Edward P. Jones, and Nicola Barker, the book analyzes how the conventional narrative authority of omniscient narrators is parlayed into claims for the cultural authority of authors and of the novel itself.

In the course of its investigation, The Return of the Omniscient Narrator engages with major movements in narrative theory—rhetorical, cognitive, and feminist—to challenge and reconsider many key narratological categories, including Free Indirect Discourse, the relation between voice and focalization, and the narrative communication model. This challenge is framed by an argument for a discursive approach to narrative fiction that addresses the neglect of authorship in narrative theory.

Introduction: The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter One: Omniscience and Narrative Authority
Chapter Two: The Direct Address and the Ironic Moralist
Chapter Three: Prolepsis and the Literary Historian
Chapter Four: Style and the Pyrotechnic Storyteller
Chapter Five: Polymathic Knowledge and the Immersion Journalist/ Social Commentator
Chapter Six: Voice and Free Indirect Discourse in Contemporary Omniscient Narration
Chapter Seven: Paralepsis and Omniscient Character Narration
Chapter Eight: Real Authors and Real Readers: A Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model""

This essay looks at how our perception of literary presence relates to markets and institutions. I wish to show how the commercialization of literary culture – from the 1800s to today’s “program era” – led to the rise of market-sheltered sites of consecration, “spaces of singularity” that shape people’s sense of cultural authority, and their orientation within the aesthetic and moral hierarchies of cultural space. Using examples from Walter Scott to Toni Morrison, I suggest that we experience literary singularity through a phenomenology of the sacred that manifests itself in the production of social trust.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the six-volume series of autobiographical novels by a self-declared ex-fiction writer from Norway, has made a profound impact on the transatlantic literary scene. Knausgaard’s success with critics and writers of literary standing in the US and Europe signals a gradual shift in the sense of interesting new directions in the contemporary novel. Writers of literary ambition now invoke ‘reality’ or ‘sincerity’ as terms of revitalisation, blurring the boundaries between fiction, life-writing, and journalism, and combining the aesthetics of the novel with those of the documentary and the memoir. If David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)  provided resonant concepts for this trend, Knausgaard gave these concepts a new life by providing a compellingly readable example. The Knausgaard phenomenon also throws light upon how the distribution of ‘institutional charisma’ separates writers along various scales of higher or lower merit and how this affects the way we read them. The making of Knausgaard required transatlantic institutions (those with the greatest weight in the debates about what can count as the ‘state of the novel today’) to associate My Struggle with a space of ‘new directions’ in the literary field. Such an institutional space encourages what I call ‘charismatic trust’, an affective relationship between readers and literary practices that varies across diverse audiences that themselves differ in their capability to elicit trust.

S’ils en ont assurément l’ambition, les « petits » auteurs ont-ils pour autant les moyens de se dire écrivains ? À l’instar des figures tutélaires retenues par l’histoire littéraire, les minores ont, à leur manière, convoqué des ressources discursives susceptibles de leur permettre de composer des identités d’auteurs. Quelles sont ces ressources et pourquoi n’ont-elles pas porté leurs fruits ? Le cas particulier des auteurs de Physiologies permet d’éclairer un aspect de la fabrique des identités d’écrivains chez les oubliés de l’histoire.