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

What happens when a radical new idea becomes the status quo? When one generation of thinkers demolishes a set of commonly held assumptions, how do members of the next generation respond? These are the large-scale questions that motivate Authorships Wake, which examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthess famous essay, The Death of the Author. Authorships Wake examines the enduring legacy of the critique of the author as an all-controlling figure determining the meaning of literary textsa critique that, in turn, participates in the broader poststructuralist interrogation of the rational, autonomous, and self-transparent Enlightenment subject. The books archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (such as Judith Butler), others who are known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner and the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). All of them, Sayerss argue, are participants in an ongoing transgeneric conversation about the aesthetic, ethical, political, and economic stakes of authorship.