Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
15. "will the author in the modern sense prove to have been only a brief episode in the history of writing? by 'author' we mean an individual who is the sole creator of unique 'works' the originality of which warrants their protection under laws of intellectual property....the author in this modern sense is a relatively recent invention, [one that] does not closely reflect contemporary writing practices. indeed, on inspection, it is not clear that this notion ever coincided closely with the practice of writing."
17. "for st. bonaventura, writing in the thirteenth century, there were four ways of making a book, and none of them involved the kind of solitary origination which edward young sought to promote:

a man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor). another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler' (compilator). another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in principle place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator (commentator)....another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principle place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor).

but it is hardly necessary to go back to the middle ages to find so corporate a view of writing, for it was still shared by samuel johnson (1709-1784)."
23. "it is the chief object of modern textual scholarship to identify in all of this writing those words that originated uniquely with johnson so that they can be properly credited to him, and a definitive oeuvre can be established. i do not with to suggest that there is anything wrong with such activities, only that they presume a proprietary authorial impulse which johnson apparently did not himself feel."
24-5. "one comes away from [ede's and lunsford's] investigation of how people actually write in business, government, industry, the sciences and social sciences with the impression that there is but one last bastion of solitary origination: the arts and humanities." and so corrolarily "we are not preparing students for the real writing tasks that await them."
26-7. hypertexts & commonplace books: "the compiler of the renaissance commonplace book composed, transcribed, commented on, and reworked the writings of others--all in apparent indifference to the identity of their originators and without regard for ownership. this quintessentially renaissance form of reading and writing is rapidly being revived by our electronic technology"