Copyright and the Death of the Author in Literature and Law
| Date | 01 November 1994 |
| Published date | 01 November 1994 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1994.tb01989.x |
REVIEW ARTICLE
Copyright and the Death
of
the Author in Literature
and Law
Lionel Bently
*
Martha
Woodmansee
and
Peter
Jaszi,
The Construction
of
Authorship: Textual
Appropriation in Law and Literature,
Durham,
NC:
Duke University Press,
1994, 462
pp, pb
f16.95.
David
Saunders,
Authorship and Copyright,
London: Routledge,
1992, 269
pp,
hb
f35.00.
A The Death
of
the Author
In the essay, ‘What is an Author?’ Michel Foucault drew attention to the fact that
the notion of the ‘author’ is socially constructed.’ Foucault claimed that the
literary author was invented during the eighteenth century and isolated ‘ownership
of the text’ as one of the characteristics of the relationship between the text and the
author. Foucault urged us to imagine
a
culture where discourse would circulate
without any need for an author, a world where it did not matter who was speaking.*
Roland Barthes went one step further and declared the ‘death of the author.’3 Barthes
argued that, once published, the text is no longer under the control
of
the author and
that the author is irrele~ant.~ Instead, Barthes asserted that the text is merely a product
of other texts and can only
be
understood through those other texts. Individual
authorship of works is to
be
replaced by interte~tuality.~
Although this radical questioning of the role
of
the author has not been
universally accepted,6 it has proved extremely influential within literary
*Lecturer in Law, King’s College, London.
My thanks go to Anne Barron, Adam Tomkins and the Copyright Reading Group at Cambridge.
Lambropoulos and Miller (eds),
Twentieth Century Literary
Iheory:
An
Introductory Anthology
(Albany: SUNY, 1987) pp 124- 142. Moreover, Foucault described the emergence of the modern
concept of authorship as ‘the privileged moment of individualization
in
the history of ideas,
knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences.
’
ibid
p 139.
Heath (ed),
Image,
Music, Text
(London: Fontana, 1977) pp 142- 148.
ibid
p 142.
‘Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social
languages, etc pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and
around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to
a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin
can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks’:
Barthes, ‘Theory of the Text’ (trans MacLeod) in
Young
(ed),
Untying the Text:
A
Poststructuralist
Reader
(London: Routledge, 1981) 31, p 39.
Masten, ‘Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama’
in
Woodmansee and Jaszi (eds),
7he Construction ofAuthorship
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994) 361,
p 37
1.
(‘Like bibliography, much
of
the more self-consciously interpretive “literary criticism”
continues to rely implicitly
on
the assumption that texts are the products of a singular and sovereign
authorial consciousness.’) For a modem defence of authorship,
see
Hirsch, ‘In Defense of the Author’
in
Validity in Interpretation
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) pp
1
-
23. In fact, it has been
63
The Modern Law Review Limited
1994
(MLR
57:6.
November). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
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