The author('s) proper(ty): Rhetoric, literature, and constructions of authorship

Following the work of Barthes and Michel Foucault, critics of authorship have routinely cited the invention of print technology as having prompted the rise of The Author in post-Renaissance Northern Europe. But this understanding of authorship as a largely Romantic construction is challenged by my re-reading of ancient rhetorical texts, in which each of the signature elements of this putatively "modern" Author are invoked, examined and mobilized by writers more than a millennium before The Author's supposed "birth."; In my introduction, I examine recent critiques of authorship in detail, focusing on the movement from the New Critical "Intentional Fallacy" to the post-Foucauldian historicizations of Martha Woodmansee. I then turn to close examinations of contemporaneous rhetorical and literary composers whose work transpired at points in time when the traditional Western construction of authorship was being created, critiqued, or challenged. These readings illustrate the degree to which both literary and rhetorical composers have mobilized constructions of authorship to build ethos and establish proprietary claims on their work. But these claims are often countered by the same composers elsewhere within their writings, suggesting that the claim of proprietary ownership is grounded in a composer's sense of the particular text as it relates to a particular audience and a particular circumstance.; My conclusion addresses the potential implications of a revised reading of the history of authorship for the teaching of writing. While teachers of composition have been instrumental in developing and enabling collaborative and socially situated writing processes, in many courses the cultivation of individual "genius" still functions as the paradigm for composing process. A historically informed critique of authorship has the potential to provide a strong theoretical basis for strategies which acknowledge the positioning of writers within their various and varied communities, thus encouraging a range of voices ill-served by the dominant constructions of authorship.