What is a Text? What is an Author?
Seminar Organizers: Katie Ryor, Tanaka Memorial Professor of International Understanding and Art History and Asuka Sango, Asociate Professor of Religion
Even though it has been nearly fifty years since Michel Foucault discussed the conception of “the author” as a product of European Romantic thought, our understanding of the author as an individual creator whose texts have greater value and authority than those texts not produced by a single, historically identifiable person remains dominant and powerful in academic culture. Likewise, even though academia has long acknowledged that what we term “texts’ includes any coherent sets of signs that transmit some kind of informative message or meaning, the written word, and especially the written word in particular formats such as the book, still occupies a hegemonic position in the production of knowledge.
This faculty seminar will explore ways of knowing under different epistemological and material conditions. The seminar is specifically interested in interrogating and challenging the idea of authorship, that is, an idea of an individual author or creator as a unique producer and a sole owner of ideas contained in a unified textual-visual space of her or his work.
In addition to examining what constitutes a “text” in various situations, the seminar will also investigate the various intersections between “author,” “text,” and “reader” that occur in various times and places, as notions of text, knowledge, authority, and discourse have had vastly different connotations and applications, including those that engage the body, performance, and ritual practice. In fact, textual authority itself is up for question. For example, a handwritten manuscript is studied as a material object that contains not only textual but also visual and historiographical information.
Pre-modern texts (whether handwritten or not) were not only read but also worshiped, worn, buried, or eaten as sacred objects, as seen in the examples of talismans and relics. Then what does it mean to read such texts? Such performative, talismanic power of texts characterizes embodied knowledge of the pre-modern world while challenging the Cartesian body-mind dualism and expanding our notions of text and literacy.
By focusing on varieties of texts, authors, and forms of discourse, our seminar seeks to explore different ways of knowing and will raise a series of questions regarding knowledge production in general. The seminar will also explore how other texts, such as visual imagery, material culture and the human body, have contributed and continue to generate modes through which humans understand their worlds.
Neither a Wikipedia page today nor a medieval manuscript can be called a “book” in the modern sense; they can be more appropriately called ongoing “projects” that are in the process of being written, edited, and rewritten over the course of time by multiple authors. Also, the primary modes of writing in the pre-modern world were copying, editing, and compiling — what the modern notion of authorship deems inferior, or even unethical.
A key question this seminar will pursue is: how can we understand creativity involved in meaning created outside of the modern notion of authorship? The more limited notion of the production of “texts” directs our academic knowledge production today; for example, we currently enforce copyright laws to protect the original, while prohibiting plagiarism as an illegal copy. In addition, despite such “single author” platforms such as Instagram, the ability to manipulate texts and images through various technical means also calls into question if and how something is authentic and thus “knowable.”
Thus, while the underlying concept for this seminar is informed by our background as scholars of the pre-modern world, we also see relevant connections with knowledge production in the modern and contemporary eras. The rapid advancement of information technology of our age is destabilizing the modern notion of authorship.
How can we find an “author” in its traditional sense amidst the collaborative, and sometimes anonymous writing space of Wikipedia? When various Star Trek technologies—such as “Universal Translator” and “Memory Alpha” (i.e., a Universal Library)—are within our close reach, how can a scholar claim unique expertise in any field of knowledge—be it the knowledge of a particular language, or that of a particular discipline?
If print technology was a unique social material condition that established the hegemony of authorship, how does digital technology challenge that hegemony? How does it challenge ocularcentrism (the primacy of written words) in modern knowledge production, since digital technology has also given rise to an unprecedented dominance of visual images?
2018-19 Faculty Fellows:
Jessica Keating, Assistant Professor of Art History, will work on her book Exotica and Visual Culture at the Court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II that sheds light on the variety of meanings—political, dynastic, religious, and ethnographic—of exotic objects acquired in the context of Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer, or art collection. She will focus on the nature of inventories as unique texts that were not singly authored but composed by many minds and hands over extended periods of time and for purposes well beyond the curatorial.
Alex Knodell, Assistant Professor of Classics, will be writing an article for a larger project on the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions (emerging and circulating in the Mediterranean world in the early first millennium BCE). The presence of these inscriptions on pottery, often in the form of poetic snippets and involving images of dance, conversation, games, and other “sympotic” activity enables him to view and analyze text as a type of media and as a material practice, and a site for socio-technological innovation.
Austin Mason, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center for the Digital Humanities and Lecturer in History, will be writing an article that employs a material culture approach and digital humanities methods to access the thought world of early Anglo-Saxon England — a world that was without either authors or texts, as traditionally defined. His project uses archaeological objects (such as cremation urns and female brooches) as “texts” that help scholars approach the mythology, poetry, riddles, and other literary elements of this culture.
George Shuffelton, Professor of English, will be writing an article on chronicles written by Londoners in the 14th and 15th centuries. The article will explore the way these anonymous citizens demonstrated self-awareness of their role as historians, and it will accompany a digital humanities project mapping the London locations cited in the 48 surviving chronicles.
Lei Yang, Assistant Professor of Chinese, will explore the factors shaping individual authorship and authorial frustration connected to literary production known as “the theory of venting one’s frustration” in early China. Analyzing extant texts illustrates how authority is embedded and the function of having an author for a specific text in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.- 220 A.D.), which influenced the entire Chinese literary history.