Cinnabar and Alabaster

reconstructing the author
xviii. etymology: "auctor (from which author is derived)...is held to derive...from" 4 terms, 3 latin & having nothing to do with "any sense of textual mastery" (agere, "to act or perform"; augere, "to grow," and auieo, "to tie") and 1 greek that does: autentim, "authority"--which "even here...is entirely remote from...autonomy since the ancient authors received their authority...from their relation to tradition and ultimately from the [authority] of God as manifested inspirationally and in the Scriptural canon."
xx. Kant & the "'Copernican Revolution' asserted that the only world we know is the world we construct through innate mental categories"; "the world of experience is not in itself given to consciousness served to problematise the mimetic subordination of author to nature; the constructive function of the trascendental ego, on the other hand, invited at least metaphorical extension into the aesthetic realm via...[the] imagination as shaping and (re)creating the world in poetic language"
xxiv-v. burke's own argument: "the only way of fulfilling the implicit demands of the Death of the Author consists in returning to the question of the author," which return "implies further than the ontologies of the author and the subject might provide a positive space for those general crises in thought that announce themselves as the postmodern"

changing conceptions of authorship
7. Plato heralded "philosophical authorship" over literary, believing that "the higher truth of Forms" could be found only through "disinterested rational enquiry" divorced from the "frenzies of poetic inspiration"; the arrival of Christian culture "reconciled...the notion of inspiration...with that of autonomous truth via the notion of auctoritas or authority derived from God"--inspiration then "shed its Bacchic and irrationalist connotations to be seen as the direct revelation of Scriptural truth...which at the same time prescribed against any sense of individual originality."
9. Shelley saw the poet "lauded as the constructive force in the political as well as the aesthetic realm" based on the ability of "the poetic self" to "bound not only that which is given to it in consciousness but also those intuitions which arise unbidden from the unconscious"; Mallarmé "define[d] the poetic function in terms of the separation rather than union of author and work" and "thus affirms a negative logocentrism by equating the word with a mysterious and thrilling absence or nothingness"--jumped the gun on disappearing the author.

the twentieth-century controversy
65. "the assumption underlying" 20th cent. debates about the author is that "the determination of authorial roles resides with the critic rather than the author"; Eliot really isn't doing that but everybody else is, in such moves as these:

• "the relation of the writer to tradition understood as literary history, literary language, conventions, genres, textual systems, etc."
• "a suspicion of expressivist notions of literature combined with a general rejection of biographicist criticism"
• concern with the relevance or irrelevance of intention to evaluation and/or interpretation
• a subordination of the question of authorship to that of reading in such a way that the former is refracted through the latter"

66. for Eliot "authors are least original where they would be most so: the distinctive cast of a work can be most clearly discerned in those places where the voices of classical precursors make themselves heard beneath the striving for precedence"; "the individual author is constituted, to some extent, within a network of textual relations which the most talented of modern writers will come to realign retrospectively," hence how his own work "consistently locates itself in relation to a synchronic sense of tradition"
67. "the intentional fallacy" [is by Wimsatt and Beardsley. now i know]: argues that "the author's intentions in writing are neither recoverable nor pertinent to the judgment of the work"--not irrelevant to its "composition but to its reception" since "intention may well govern the scene of writing but not that of reading." and we tend to misapply this: their purpose was "forbidding intention as a standard in evaluation" (emph. mine) but we tend to apply it more to interpretation, leading us to "justify an interpretive freedom quite at odds" with the authors' claims.
68. Derrida won't play well with others--"resists the polarities of the debate" by "affirm[ing] that intention is a cardinally relevant category of both writing and reading but...it cannot encompass the full range of textual signification," so "what is meant by a text is therefore a subset of what is written in a text: intention will generate its own area of significance but iwll also confront moments of contradiction whereby the text will open itself to a reading which legitimately eludes or evades the conscious purposes of its author"
69. Barthes "short-circuits the intention-debate by positing writing as the origin on meaning-effects and the reader as the sufficient principle of the text's unity"

feminism and the authorial subject
145. "the struggles of feminism have been primarily a struggle for authorship--understood in the widest sense as the arena in which culture attempts to define itself"; "the very idea of the canon enables patriarchy to police the border between authorship and writing in hierarchical terms which have traditionally placed women 'writers' in the second and devalued category"; feminist contributions fall into 3 categories:

• "sponsorial"--"the assertion by the female author of the right of belonging to the state and estate of authorship
• "revisionist"--"the attempt to redefine authorship over and against the patriarchal model and to promote a counter-canon of female authors
• "theoretical"--"the recognition that authorship and canonicity are inherently and inalienably patriarchal institutions which feminist thought should pass beyond

147. the good side: for Gilbert and Gubar "where the male writer is overwhelmed by the already-written, the female author has all too few precursors and is therefore involved in the creation rather than the misreading of precedents....women's writing...seeks to build rather than trope a tradition"; complicating the issue, Lacan & Cixous distinguish "between a 'feminine' mode of signficication, characterized by the use of words for their sound, pulsation, and music, and a 'masculine' use of langauge, which stressed the rational, linear, and logical" (& children tend toward whatever mode they're taught first--experience rather than "the sex of the writer" "determine[s] the gender" of writing (<--L); "écriture féminine is accessible to both men and women, since in avant-garde writing it is woman who speaks regardless of whether the text is signed in the name of 'woman' or 'man'" (<--C).
149. Miller points out "the ironic situation whereby no sooner did feminism excavate the space of women's authorship than it consorted with a (largely male-inspired) attempt to close off the space of authorship altogether" and argues that "a return to the author is necessary if feminist politics and theory are not to become terms of a reciprocal hostility"--"current feminist celebration of 'the body' over patriarchal abstraction" might be seen "as a synecdochic movement towards the situatedness which Miller recommends"

ideologies and authorship
215. political criticism "is generally united" in seeing "authorship as specific political praxis" not as an "autonomous," history-transcending mystic creation--"the author is thought to speak committedly for a particular moment of historical change"; in Benjamin what matters is not "the author's relation to socio-economic conditions but...his existence within such conditions"
216. "poststructural and cultural materialist modes of ideological critique" are interested in authorship "not in terms of the individuals who occupy its space but with regard to the ideological implications of its function as an inexorable category within the discursive field"; for Sartre, "since...the self is never determined, authorship extends beyond the text to govern the individual's fundamental mode of being-in-the-world"
217. "Foucault reduces the ontological significance of authorship while enlarging its textual remit: his identification of a unique class of 'fundamental' authors such as Marx and Freud...accedes nothing to authorship as presence and everything to the power of the proper name's corpus. the separation of author and biographical subject thereby identifies a space of authorhsip which exceeds the empirical presence or history of its signatory"
219. Ní Fhlathúin "highlights the ethico-political dangers of diversting an author of any power to respond authoritatively to the reading of his text": "separating text and intention denies the author any political power to distance himself from the attribution of erroneous, blasphemous, or critical motives. readers are thus empowered to construct their own sense of the author from the text." theoretical fallout of this: perhaps "neo-political criticism has implied a return to agency and authorship without calibrating the form which such a return should take"; current "conflict between the postmodern dispersal of agency and its requirement within a postcolonial politics... reveals a network of textual indeterminacy" with insufficiently-examined material consequences.

writing the self
305. Montaigne's (autobiographical) essays are "always entirely aware of the fact that the subject of the enunciation (the 'Montaigne' who writes) can never become one with the subject of the utterance (the 'Montaigne' who is written about): the autobiographical 'i' is constantly divided in its search of a past self which is ever in flight"
305-6. the "Cartesian cogito" effectively kills the author off way before Barthe ever tried it, as follows [i think?]: if i only come into existance by thinking, i don't pre-exist thought bodily or otherwise, and don't post-exist it; when someone else reads my work, he/she is the think-er existing in that moment, and i as the author am absent; my thinking and thus existing are already past. & Nietzche as "the first thinker to announce the philosopher as author and creator (rather than rationally-elevated recipent) of a perspectival 'truth'"