Abstract

Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable.At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the ‘formation of the subject.’. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach. David Saunders and Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders is the author of Law and Authorship , and is coauthor with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and the Policing of Pornography . Hunter is the author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education . His current project is a study of aesthetics as an ethos or way of life