The Death of the Author Revisited: Authorship in Hypertext and E-Literature

Abstract

This paper examines how the shift from print to digital media transforms traditional notions of literary authorship. Drawing on Roland Barthes‟s 1967 dictum that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author” (Vitali-Rosati, 2014) and Michel Foucault‟s concept of the author-function as a discursive construct, we argue that hypertext and electronic literature enact a new paradigm of distributed authorship. Digital narratives – from early hypertext fiction to contemporary interactive media – foreground reader agency and technological mediation. We trace the theoretical lineage from Barthes‟s and Foucault‟s critiques of the author to poststructuralist accounts of open texts, then analyze how hypertext (“a galaxy of signifiers”) and ergodic literature demand nontrivial reader interaction (as per Aarseth). We show how authorship in e-literature becomes a joint venture: the author as designer (Bolter), the reader as cocreator, and the technology as co-author (Hayles‟s notion of medium materiality). Case studies such as Michael Joyce‟s afternoon, a story and Shelley Jackson‟s Patchwork Girl illustrate these shifts. (Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship, 2008) Lastly, we contend that Barthes‟s metaphorical “death” is being materialized rather than simply proclaimed: authorship is now a distributed process among writers, readers, and code. This analysis extends Barthes and Foucault into the digital age and offers implications for literary theory and pedagogy in an era of networked texts.(Mazzali-Lurati, 2009)