Alastair Pennycook's: The Meaning Of Authorship

Within the chapter of Authorship, James Naremore notes that authors are “written by” a “series of historical, social and cultural determinants” (1999, p22), which can be said to easily differentiate films precisely from one another.

Grantland S. Rice, author of The Transformation of Authorship in America, contends that the ultimate composition of American literature is fundamentally based upon a combination

During the 1950’s, literature underwent a tremendous change in structure as well as philosophy. J. D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye helped contribute to this revolution by highlighting new philosophies in literature. This is evident in pre-1950 writing as well as the changes that persisted through the remaining part of the decade, especially in the writing style popularized during the Great Depression. The Catcher in the Rye also contributed to a change in conflict. This conflict started as an external object to overcome, but after the release of this book and others, the conflict changed from external to internal and became a moral or philosophical struggle to be thought about rather than something to overcome.

What, then, is an author? The essential characteristic of authorship is contained within the author’s relationship to the final work: an author defines, or contributes to the definition of, that final work. The piece on the side of the train car is defined by all three of those young men, just as a novel is defined by its writer, or a song by those who perform it. The traditional argument will interject here that there must be intent in order for there to be

Although Lethem and Shields take very different approaches to discuss the idea of plagiarized material, there are several similarities between the two essays. It is interesting to note that both excerpts from ‘The Reality Hunger’ and ‘Ecstasy Influence’ literally use other authors’ words to develop their own argument, thereby proving that as long as the context and purpose of the content are changed, it should not be considered plagiarism. In order to advance their arguments, both authors

The term 'literary writing' calls to mind works by writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth; definitive examples of all that the term implies. We instinctively associate the term with characteristics such as artistic merit, creative genius, and the expression of mankind's noblest qualities. In this essay I will explore some of the characteristics of this kind of writing.

Masterpieces always come with good reasons and fantastic story telling. On one hand, a good reason or a logic progress with facts makes a work more convincing; on the other hand, those fantacies and make-ups show a writer’s reflection on facts and reasons he or she received, and are extensions of those facts and reasons, rendering the work interesting and even more convincing. In three famous and classic works, On Liberty, Hard Times, and The Communist Manifesto, we can see how writers combine facts with fictions and compose excellent works.

The Twentieth Century found literature with a considerably different attitude and frame-of-mind than had the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Two hundred years is, of course, a long time to allow change within genres, but after the fairly gradual progression of the novel as a form, its change in the hands of modernism happened rapidly in comparison. Explaining how texts within the framework of modernist writing are “different” require laying out from what they are different, how, and why. A direct cause of, and coinciding with, literature’s abruptly changing face was the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent

As the story so often goes, I was once required to write, and thus I have been writing (largely under mandate) ever since. Although a Grandmother, who I in my childhood stayed with weekly, spoke chiefly in Spanish, I never learned enough of the language to ever properly forget it. This is a decision I’ve come to deeply regret in light of the book sales of Richard Rodriguez. My writing in adolescence was characterized by its being profoundly uninteresting. The highlight was a highly directed poem concerning the creation of chocolate bars, only a poem in the sense that jury duty is a form legal activism. To be resentful of the nature this sort of writing exercise however would be narcissistic to the point of supposing a person who’s sentience spans only two presidential terms would has had anything unique to say about chocolate bars, allowed the proper poetic license. I came to much prefer reading over writing, as somebody had something to gain in that exchange. As it turns out, writing assignments persisted unabated by the logic of this argument. Eventually becoming dissatisfied with the quantity of anachronisms in English, I would later go on to study the Japanese language over 4 semesters. The highlight of this section of writing was a 12 sentence narrative about a thief boy, written by an American college student at the level of a Japanese elementary school student.

In his essay ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ Robert Louis Stevenson vehemently disagrees with the views of the renowned authors Walter Besant and Henry James, on what constitutes the nature and function of fiction. This debate entitled ‘The Art of fiction’ was initiated by Besant following on from his lecture at the Royal Institution, and continued by James in his essay of the same name which was published in Longmans Magazine in 1884. This debate effectively became the ‘most sustained discussion of the nature of fiction at the time’ (The Open University, 2013).

In modernism it started with the presenting ambiguity of the texts. In post-modernism intertextuality developed into two dimensions: horizontal (writer-reader relation) and vertical (one text to another text relation). Post-modernism doesn’t hide the fact the texts are constructed, and sees the values of the text in text’s place in the network of texts. Borges, the key figure in Spanish-speaking modern literature, writes that ‘The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms’. [15] This becomes one of the core statements of post-modernism: ‘everything has been already written’.

Through the medium of novel, Coetzee augments the question regarding the authorship of a text and problems with realism. In the concluding part, he projects the act of subconscious plagiarism that occurs in the process of writing. Tansley records Martin Dodd’s observation who regards it as an act of vandalism while others view that Coetzee used it to reinforce his ideas regarding “diving into the wreck”, a phrase inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poem titled thus. Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” discusses the subconscious re-use of others’ works, describing inspiration as “inhaling the memory of an act never experienced” (60-68). Thereby, Coetzee must have retained its memory and used a similar image of exploration

Literature can be discussed as the accepted ‘cannon’ or as texts which possess a quality so as to designate them literary in nature. The non-literary can have literary qualities and follow a model of story-telling precedent by traditional literature and yet not be considered works of literature themselves. As purported by Jonathan Culler’s theory, we define literature not only by the intrinsic qualities it holds which lend a work its literariness, but must question what purpose the text serves. There are key devices that compound to form what we classify as ‘literature’, such as: the foregrounding or spot-lighting of language, the integration of language, the aesthetic value of the text, whether or not the pieces fictional and as self-reflexive

When Pennycook analyzed the issue of plagiarism in his essay, Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism, he introduced the essence of language learning and the evolution of the notion of author in a more detailed way, which provides a different angle to interpret Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author. Barthes describes writing in the beginning of his essay as a “composite, oblique space where our subject slip away” (142). Pennycook’s passages can give a lucid explanation of Barthes’s word choice of “composite”. Pennycook believed that, according to Western traditions, literary originality came into being alongside a “wholesale borrowing of language and ideas” (212). Writing, as a part of language learning, needs

In other words, the literary works could be changed, abridged or altered in some other way without their author’s having the say. There was an attempt in 1710 to change/improve the situation when A Copyright Act introduced limited copyright: after certain time being in print, the “copyright remained with the author, if living” (Raven 23). In reality though, most authors continued surrendering all claims to their works (Raven 24). As a consequence, until 1774, booksellers remained the ones retaining the authority over the printing process and print industry (Pritchard 308), buying wholly and completely the right to reproduce a literary work (Raven 23). In other words, “the concept of copyright as a representation of authorial ownership of intellectual property did not prevail until the … early 19th centuries” (Finkelstein 71).