Page 28 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

AUTHOR/SHIP

AUTHOR/SHIP

A common-sense concept which accounts for meaning by ascribing
it to a creative, individual source. In such a context, an author’s
intentions govern and warrant a particular reading for texts, the
meanings of which are taken to be a form of private property,
belonging to the author (even though the text itself, in the form of a
book, may belong to the reader). Meaning is deemed to be a creation
of individual genius or experience, which is then transferred in a linear
way directly to the brain of the reader. The activity of reading is
reduced to that of a receiver, more or less finely tuned to pick up the
already fished meanings sent down the channel by the author. This
common-sense approach to authorship has its origins in medieval
religious reading, where the ‘author’ of a sacred text such as the Bible
was thought to be divine, and thus there was nothing for readers to do
but work out the authorial intentions from the clues in the text, and then
to obey them. The idea that readers might ‘make’ meanings for
themselves was, literally, blasphemy.
Authorial intentionalism has become controversial in modern,
secular textual criticism, because it takes the obvious fact that texts are
written or scripted by a human agent (or agents) and uses this fact to
underpin the highly ideological theory of meaning outlined above.
An author is not ‘one who writes’. Only some writers and writings
‘count’ for the purposes of authorship. For instance, private,
ephemeral and functional writings usually don’t count as authored:
that is, letters, diaries, shopping lists, school exercises, notes in the
margins of books, telephone messages and even ‘creative writing’ – the
things that most people actually write. In the public domain the same
applies. It would be hard to find an author for labels, advertisements,
news, posters, street and shop signs, graffiti, junk mail, technical
instructions, etc. – possibly the majority of reading matter encountered
on a day-to-day basis.
Authorship can no longer be found readily in creative and fictional
writing. Much of the fiction circulating in modern societies comes in
the form of television and movies, where the concept of authorship is
very hard to sustain, given the input of so many people in the
production process. Other creative works circulate orally and aurally –
stories, jokes, songs. These too escape the traditional definition of
authorship, even when they can be traced to an individual writer.
Authorship is a creation of literary culture and the marketplace; it is
one of the great markers of ‘high’ as opposed to ‘popular’ culture, and

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