Well-I'm going to begin with the Gere chapter-because it's the most interesting to me-because of stuff I've read about copyleft and what not. Our saga of the story of authorship pick up in this chapter from the early modern-era and how authorship was firmly established at that point to the Americas, where according to our author. "... by the 1870s, the concept of intellectual property was firmly established in the United States, and the construction of authorhsip had been effected that literary criticism lavished considerable attention on the background and intentions of authors, and authors became more powerful advocates for their own rights "(p.383). What this sounds like to me, is that authorship had become fully commodified in 19th century capitalist America. Some media critics like Sut Jhally talk about "commondity fetishism" and what it sounds like to me, is that once authorship had become a commodity, that commodity was given exalted status. For an example of commodity fetishism, think about people and their favorite "brands" of water. It's all H-2-0, but now that it's become commodified, the only step left was to elevate the status of certain brands of water. So, authorship by this time, had become a commodified and elevated brand. In comes the 19th century mania for self-improvement in America and the establishment of mutual education societies. The societies that were composed of women, tended to subvert this branding ofauthorship with "communcal rather than individual ownership of texts, texts both used and produced by the club" (p. 387). They bought texts in common for common usage and they produced texts that were meant to be used by the club and this carried over to the production of texts by club members. they prodcued texts that were designed for common ownership and use by the club. Fascinating. The obvious question is, didthis happen because even the middle-class women who belonged to these societies were marinalized by their status as women and so produced common texts as a form of coomon resistance, or, is thier something inherent to "ownership" and commodification and gender in capitalist society?
Thomas takes us back to pre-capitalist Renaissance europe and a phenomenan called the Commonplace Book. These were blank books in which people copied and it appears, felt free to re-interpret poems thatthey copied. We don't even know who the "authors" of these commonplace books are, as "Most of the time, these poems were transcribed without attribution; sometimes even the comiler of the commonplace book remained anonymous"(p.401). The commonplace that have been collected show a remarkable re-maing of texts. One of thos e commonpalce books that is talked about in this chapter is one that was kept by a cleric named John Lilliat, who even though he obviously regarded texts as sacred, re-wrote some of these to. One such instance was of him re-writing a Psalm to compose a prophecy of what he felt would happen to his England. So, he remembered the psalm-but remaded it also. That is why, in the pre-authorship era, Thomas says "Commonplace books are also about the intimate connection between remembering and re-marking a text-about that is, a practice of reading contingent upon re-writing"(p.410). Think about how we re-mark our own memories as we remember them. The only difference, is that with the commonpalce book, men of letters, remembered sources that were near and dear to them by re-marking them. My question of this is, can we think of any examples in contemporary society in which we remember our texts by re-marking them? An obvious one to me, is people who have used digital technology to "create" muscial works that are already "remembered" in records.
I guess in some ways, the Beaumont and or Flectcher article was least interesting to me, mostly because it seemed to wallow in somewhat obscure, at least for me, literary criticism. It does seem to apply to the discussion we had in class of Shakespeare's "authorship" of the plays even though we know that in Renaissance times, authorhsip of plays was a collaboration of the company, it was ssure to be a practice that carried forth into the early modern world of Shakespeare. It seems that the point that Mastern is tryingto make is that once plays from these eras become literature, "criticism has read them primarily as written communciation between writers and readers (p.366)" So, once they obtained a status beyond perfromance, they demanded an author. Wherethis goes into the title of the piece is Mastern's criticism of the bibliographic criticism (and that ain't navel gazing among literary scholars folks, I don't know what is!!) that insists in determining of a particluar set of plays were the sole product of BEaumont, or Fletcher, and how the two are parsed out by intense criticism and reconstrcution and how this type of criticism relies "implicitly on the assumption that texts are the products of a single and sovereign authorial consciousness" (p.371). The recognition of collaboration requires a recognition that canonical texts are socially constructed. To somewhat visit our Q's from last week-What does it matter if Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare?
Jaszi's article-the bookend to the one we reviewed last week-takes a look at how critiques of authroship have developed. There is the purely cultural approach taken by Focualt which challenged the "naturalness" of authorhsip by packing it into its cultural context. Then Jaszi, gives us Kaplan, who appears to opearte from a more brute political economy model which critiques authorship based on politcal, legal and economic concepts. He then cites Woodmansee's (how's THAT for academic logrolling) attempts to wed the two concepts in the 1980s. Jaszi then starts taking us down the road of his own scholarship on authorhsip. He takes us through the Feist case, which we covered a little bit in class last week. It then goes extensively into the Koons case in which Koons took the content of a published photo-altered it somewhat and made a sculpture of it. The photgrapher sued. The photographer won, becasue of the "substantial similarity" of the works and the fact that it was not, according to the judge in the case, parody, which is protected. This decsision says Jaszi, discourages, "appropriational artists" (my term) whose methods "entail reworking pre-existing materials, while rewarding those whose 'dedication to 'originality' qualifies them as truie 'authors' in the Romantic sense" (p.48). In looking at these notions, Jaszi concludes that the "ideology of Romantic 'authorship' however, has greater potential to mislead than to guide decision-makers who will shape the legal regime" as we head into the era of inteernt and all th collaboration and appropriation that takes place there. So, what do you all think? I"ve known some people who specialize in "appropriated art" is it a slug at outmoded notions of capitalism, or should we protect authors, when it may appear the author is a dying breed?
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