Content area
Abstract
This dissertation revisits Roland Barthes's observation that the "author is dead" through an investigation and critique of contemporary film, fiction, and corporate bookselling. The dissertator applies a theory of ideology and commodity fetishism---taken largely from the work of Slavoj Zizek---to define the contemporary condition of what the dissertator defines as "post-Authorship".
After theorizing the conditions of "post-Authorship," the dissertator closely examines the text and criticism of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Novel, and the marketing practices of the Barnes and Noble Superstore for signs of Authorship commodity fetishism. The dissertator sees commodity fetishism as re-fashioning Authorship as a textual sign, among other signs, of reading, concluding from this examination that readers today are "reading Authorship as much as they are reading texts,"
