Description
Trade ReviewAuthorship’s Wake animates a new path for exploring the enduring legacy of the “authorship debates.” This lively and original book not only brilliantly elucidates the political stakes of proclaiming the “death of the author,” but also uses these insights to form novel and compelling arguments regarding a range of contemporary phenomena from campus speech debates to man-splaining. What the sole author leaves in his wake, we come to learn, are nothing less than the seeds for cultivating vital new practices of affect, agency, and collectivity. * Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College, USA *
Inventive. Inspiring. Important. A passionate defense of the emancipatory post-war writing daring to stretch beyond authorship and the fiction/theory binary; a celebration, in the wake of Roland Barthes, of the wildly critical visions of such writers as Teju Cole, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace; and an invitation to form a new kind of
study group with them all as we take on this startlingly strange and yet terrifyingly familiar 21st century. * Alice Jardine, Professor, Harvard University, USA, and author of At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Words Streaming in Your Wake” 1. Communication: Maggie Nelson and the Literary Text as Letter 2. Intention: The Inconsistent Anti-Intentionalism of Zadie Smith and Judith Butler 3. Agency: Roland Barthes and the Men Who Hold Forth 4. Labor: David Foster Wallace, Cowboy of Information Conclusion: Study Groups Bibliography Index
