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Electronic literature and its departure from the supremacy of the author function

Heiko Zimmermann

pp. 243-266

In "What Is an Author?', Michel Foucault maintains that our present society can only accept literary discourses if they are governed by what he calls author function. In electronic literature, there are texts that systematically depart from this tradition. In order to identify these texts, the chapter introduces the model of the textual action space, which is then used to analyse the production and reception processes of works of electronic literature, among them Toby Litt's blog fiction class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Slice, the collaborative writing project A Million Penguins and Renée Turner's mash-up fiction She…. The results of the analysis of the texts highlight that literary theory and philosophy need to review their models to accommodate them to changing practices of literary production and reception.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33147-8_13

Full citation:

Zimmermann, H. (2016)., Electronic literature and its departure from the supremacy of the author function, in A. Selleri & P. Gaydon (eds.), Literary studies and the philosophy of literature, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 243-266.

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