Authorship

This week we delve deeper into the concept of authorship, particularly around what and how we understand authorship to exist. The theorists of week two provide examples of authorship that do not entirely coincide with the auteur theory, more so they present ideologies that challenge the atypical notion of auteurism. John Hartley’s three headings of authorship (God, No-One, Everyone), Jonathan Gray’s pluralistic authorial view, and Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of the author as producer. John Hartley theorizes three sub-categories for authorship: God is an Author, No-One is an Author, and Everyone is an Author; each of these concepts furthered by anecdotal emphasis and overall illustrating the vastness of the term author. God is an Author

Essentially, Gray believes that no-one person is a singular author, but rather there are multiple collaborators. Gray is a couple weeks ahead of his time by elaborating the differences between many of the theorists we will discuss in class notably the differences in ideology between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It is important to note that Gray not only furthers the concept of multiplicity in terms of authorship, but he presents new foundations for how to approach the contested topic: “debate over authorship has often been those of ‘who is the author?’ and ‘what is the author?’ both of those questions may be more profitably answered by asking instead ‘when is the author?’ and ‘how does the authorship happen?’” (Gray, 107). Gray emphasizes the point that the initial birth of authorship is not the key point, but rather what the extenuating circumstances surrounding the author that is more important. Finally, Walter Benjamin continues Gray’s concept of ‘how does authorship happen?’ through his theory of ‘the Author as producers.’ Benjamin contends that authorship is formed when a creator is “inserted into the context of living social situations” (Benjamin, 87). Essentially, the author cannot simply view a subject from the outside but instead be immersed in the content that they write about. Benjamin poses the question as to why we value