Author and Context and Pease.

This explores the ideological shift that underpins the function and subject position of author, principally the tumultuous shift between idealist and pragmatist. The author seems to simultaneously be a part/ contributor to ‘free’ culture and ‘commodity’ culture- or perhaps somehow slips between the two, never being completely orientated to one particular mode of creative output. At first I thought Pease highlighted the frailty of the author- namely in the way it keeps going out of fashion in accordance to the whims of the society it inhabits. “Unlike other works referring to a writer’s activity- such as essayist, or poet, or dramatist- the term “author” raises questions about authority and whether the individual is the source or the effect of that authority.” (p.106) But perhaps change is the consistency that keeps the author strong- revisionism ensures constant relevance. When one mode expires it is replaced with another that answers to the demands of a new generation and thereby fills the gap in the cultural landscape so that there is never a literary void.

If this is how and why the author exists then it would appear that the archetype of the author-god has expired. The author is not the omniscient creator of culture, rather it is an interpreter of culture, it does not cultivate but explores and attempts to understand- such explorations become articulated through a literary response. Under this precedence it is impossible to have an autotelic text that is a wholly insular artifact. The separatist novel is replaced with one that is completely bound in contextual issues. In this way the schools of thought that are relevant to literary criticism the literary “isms” such as feminism, Marxism, new historicism are cultural anchors. As soon as we associate them with literary production the text is completely imbued with cultural nuances rendering it a literary manifestation of a cultural moment. The authors theoretical framework becomes the link to the ‘real world’, the thing that binds a text to its context. An author, I think, has two contexts the physical (tangible/ visible/ cultural/social) and metaphysical (intangible/ invisible/ psychological/ emotional). The latter would be particularly difficult to divorce from ones writings, and while authors have been known to construct a physical context I think it would be difficult to simulate a meta one. Filling the pages with ones thoughts immediately transports the facets of the metaphysical context into the work. Authors and books cannot evade or outrun their contexts, though they may be able to slip between different contexts and realities/ or fictions, a text will always have the trace of its origins upon it.