“If you’re so famous, why aren’t you dead?”
By Eric Hill • Feb 4th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, Essays, From the InterwebGhost Stories
by Emily Landau | 1 Comment »
An actor achieves immortality through his face, a singer through his voice. An author is able to live eternally through his writing, but for some, the finished words are not enough.
The critical notions surrounding authorship have been contentious since the 1960s, when developments in literary theory upset accepted notions about art. Critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (two names sure to make any humanities graduate student cringe) dismantled the axiom that the author was the architect of a literary work’s interpretive possibilities. Barthes went so far as to declare “the death of the author,” urging scholars to seek out a text’s meaning in its language, rather than in the intentions of its author.
Despite Barthes’ obituary for the author, the cult of authorship persists. Publishers around the world are breathing fresh life into deceased famous authors by posthumously releasing their “lost” works. In 2009, new books by Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and in a delicious twist of irony, Roland Barthes, hit the shelves. On the slate for the next couple of years are posthumous works by Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño. (Bolaño’s corpse is proving to be staggeringly prolific, with as many as four releases on the horizon.)
Read the rest of this article at The Walrus.
Eric Hill is the editor of branta.
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