Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

determinations of subjectivity the possibility of a feminine rematerialisation of the subject:
'Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution,
production that men have had they have not . . . felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito,
etc. Because the female subject has juridically been excluded from the polis, hence decentred,
'disoriginated', deinstitutionalised, etc., her relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority,
displays structurally important differences from that universal position.' Nancy K. Miller, Subject to
Change: Reading Feminist Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Though the relation of
feminism to the issues of author and gen(d)eric subjectivity have been scarcely touched upon
here, the bibliography cites many texts influential in formulating and debating the concepts of the
deaths of woman-as-author and Woman-as-woman, the ideas of écriture feminine, the
deconstruction of the binarism male-female and so on. In general, what is said in this work of the
death of the author applies in general to feminist thanatography, but would need to be
reformulated in accordance with ethico-political and ontological questions of inexhaustible
complexity.
Epilogue
1. Régis Debray, 'The Book as Symbolic Object' in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the
Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 139–151: pp. 145–146.
2. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). While more recent contributions
have been made to this convergence theory, Landow's work continues to orient the debate (cf.
Sadie Plant, below). A more sceptical (and splendid) account of the relations between technology
and authorship can be found in James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the
Construction of the Information Society (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997).
3. R. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), p. 23.
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. xxiv. It should also be noted that digital arguments tend to
draw upon the most vulgar and vulgarised tenets of 'poststructuralism'.
5. This rhetoric is finely critiqued in Paul Duguid, 'Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of
the Book' in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, op. cit., pp. 63–101.
6. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962); Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1963); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).
7. Raffaele Simone, 'The Body of the Text' in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, op.
cit., pp. 239–251: p. 241; p. 251. Nicole Yankelovich, Norman Meyrowitz and Andries van Dam,
'Reading and Writing the Electronic Book', IEEE Computer 18 (October 1985), pp. 15–30: p. 21.
8. Michael Heim, Electronic Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), p. 215.
9. See Jorge Luis Borges, 'Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote' in Borges, Labyrinths, edited by
Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 62–71.
10. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973).
11. See Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London:
Fourth Estate, 1997), p. 194. Plant then bids us look at the Mona Lisa with eyes refocused by the
technological revolution: 'The Mona Lisa's appeal is precisely the fact that the image does more
than passively hang on the gallery wall. As her spectators always say, Mona Lisa looks at them
as much as, if not more than, they can look at her. To the extent that it works so well, Leonardo's
picture is a piece of careful software engineering. An interactive machine has been camouflaged
as a work of Western art' (ibid.).
12. Raffaele Simone, 'The Body of the Text' in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book,
op. cit., p. 240.
13. See Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Stillinger's interesting book, however, must succumb to
the myth of solitary genius in order to reject it.
14. George P. Landow, Hypertext, op. cit., p. 96.