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

15. Luca Toshi, 'Hypertext and Authorship' in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, op.
cit., pp. 169–207: p. 202.
16. Georges Poulet, 'Criticism and the Experience of Interiority' in Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato, eds, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 56–72: p. 56.
17. Geoffrey Nunberg in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed. The Future of the Book, op. cit., p. 18. Nunberg is
here summarising Raffaele Simone's argument (ibid., pp. 239–51).
18. St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),
pp. 92–3.
19. See J. Hillis Miller, 'The Ethics of Hypertext', Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 27–39:
p. 35; Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du Cercle (Paris: Plon, 1961).
20. George P. Landow, Hypertext, op. cit., p. 178.
21. Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones, op. cit., pp. 189–90. Of the connection between weaving and
computing, she declares: 'On the computer monitor, any change to the image is also a change to
the program; any change to the programming brings another image to the screen. This is the
continuity of product and process at work in the textiles produced on the loom. The program, the
image, the process, and the product: these are all the softwares of the loom. Digital fabrications
can be endlessly copied without fading into inferiority; patterns can be pleated and repeat,
replicated folds across a screen. Like all textiles, the new softwares have no essence, no
authenticity' (ibid., p. 189). The metaphor (industrial art = technological freedom) no more
promises feminist empowerment than the dependence of cyberspace on nautical images
guarantees the enfranchisement of Third World fishermen.
22. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 20.
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed.
Sarah Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 153.
24. On the false opposition between 'a view from nowhere' and 'a view from everywhere', see
Patricia Waugh, 'Feminism and Postmodernism' in s Jackson and Jackie Jones, eds,
Contemporary Feminist Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 1998). In
its movement from subjective to linguistic disembodiment, digital technology follows the trajectory
of a vulgar poststructuralism (see also note 4 above). One might indeed wonder whether the
academic version of hypertextual discourse is less the enthusiasm of digital technologists than
the last stand of a 'weak' poststructuralism which sees its own (idealist) preoccupations mirrored
in current material technology.
25. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 214.
26. Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and
Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 131.
27. See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 20. In less delicate hands, this
sidestepping of authorial categories can seem like a reaction formation: 'The hollowness of the
self that so enraged and demoralised . . . now inspires respect and study, not recrimination and
calls for revolution. N[ew] H[istoricism] intiates a truly radical change. It accepts the inevitability of
emptiness.'—H. Aram Veeser 'The New Historicism' in H. Aram Veeser,
ed., The New Historicism Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–32: p. 19.
28. Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, op. cit., p. 125.
29. Ibid., p. 118.
30. Stephen Greenblatt, 'Resonance and Wonder', in Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, eds,
Literary Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 74–9: p. 74.
31. On modernity's tendency to depict authorship in terms of a false opposition between
transcendence and impersonality, see Seán Burke, 'Reconstructing the Author' in Seán Burke,
ed., Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1995), pp. xv–xxx.
32. Cf. Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1933). Marjorie Greene has some excellent pages—to which the above is indebted—
on the hollowness of the transcendental subject position. See Marjorie Greene, The Knower and