Your faithful blog committee moderates posts and comments on  a rotating basis.  I was  “on call” on Tuesday evening and, returning home in despair after a night at Miller Park,  inadvertently published posts by Professors Greipp and Papke under my own name. The mistake was fixed in the morning.

But I found the latter error intriguing. Here I was, ostensibly the “author” of a post regretting “dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.” It was as if someone had replaced my bedside Edmund Burke with Jean-Paul Sartre.

But here’s the thing. I do agree – in a sense – with David’s point.

I greatly enjoyed last week’s exchange among colleagues Bruce Boyden, Ed Fallone, and Gordon Hylton regarding literary sequels and the general purposes of copyright law. It is my impression that most blog posts do not purport to be “scholarly,” but the posts by Boyden, Fallone, and Hylton had the length and depth necessary for that characterization.  I hated to see the exchange end. 

The exchange rekindled for me the intellectual question of how to best understand what an “author” is.  The notion of an “author” in modern western culture is a weighty one, carrying with it some sense of origination.  It connotes more than “writer,” which is a less prestigious characterization that goes primarily to a particular activity.  We customarily assume “authors” are intense and even tortured souls heroically working alone.  We also sometimes assume that their chief incentive must and should be monetary enrichment.  These assumptions grow out of dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.

I think it is better to conceive of an “author” as socially constituted.