Theories Of Authorship

The film director or `auteur' has been central in film theory and criticism over the past thirty years. Theories of Authorship documents the major stages in the debate about film authorship, and introduces recent writing on film to suggest important ways in which the debate might be reconsidered.

In this wide ranging collection of essays, eleven literary scholars and creative writers examine authorship and authority in relation to the production and reception of cultural texts. Ranging in time from the Renaissance to the era of digital publishing, the essays invite us to reconsider the influential theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu for our understanding of writers such as Philip Sidney, Thomas Hardy, Laura Riding, W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and J.M. Coetzee. Shedding new light on authority’s complex role in the generation of cultural meaning, the essays will be of interest to students and teachers of literary history and critical theory alike.

This collection helps students and researchers understand the foundations of writing center studies in order to make sound decisions about the types of methods and theoretical lenses that will help them formulate and answer their research questions. In the collection, accomplished writing center researchers discuss the theories and methods that have enabled their work, providing readers with a useful and accessible guide to developing research projects that interest them and make a positive contribution. It introduces an array of theories, including genre theory, second-language acquisition theory, transfer theory, and disability theory, and guides novice and experienced researchers through the finer points of methods such as ethnography, corpus analysis, and mixed-methods research. Ideal for courses on writing center studies and pedagogy, it is essential reading for researchers and administrators in writing centers and writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines programs.

Incorporating several kinds of scholarship on medieval authorship, the essays examine interrelated questions raised by the relationship between an author and a reader, the relationships between authors and their antecedents, and the ways in which authorship interacts with the physical presentation of texts in books.

Theories of authorship and material culture provide the framework for this study. It maps Anglo-American authorship as it shifts from a theoretical to a more material approach to its study in contexts recognized as key to its development: the nineteenth-century literary market-place, twentieth-century experimentalism and postmodern culture.

Visual Authorship is a collection of essays which offers a new approach to the study of authorship. The contributors point out that individual creativity is essential in the richly faceted media landscape of today. The individual creativity and the role of authorship are discussed in relation to film, television, computer games and the Internet. Theories of cognition and emotion offer new tools for the understanding of visual aesthetics; they explain why works of art are created by individuals and not by discourses and ideologies. Several contributors analyse in detail the works of Lars von Trier.

Conceived as the successor to Gregg and Steinberg's Cognitive Processes in Writing, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to writing research. The authors describe their current thinking and data in such a way that readers in psychology, English, education, and linguistics will find it readable and stimulating. It should serve as a resource book of theory, tools and techniques, and applications that should stimulate and guide the field for the next decade. The chapters showcase approaches taken by active researchers in eight countries. Some of these researchers have published widely in their native language but little of their work has appeared in English-language publications.

Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.