The empty cage : inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of the author

Resource Information

The work The empty cage : inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of the author represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The empty cage : inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of the author

Title remainder

inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of the author

Statement of responsibility

Carla Benedetti ; translated from the Italian by William J. Hartley

Creator

• Benedetti, Carla, 1952-

Subject

• Auteurschap
• Authorship -- Philosophy
• Autorschaft
• Letterkunde
• Littérature -- Philosophie
• Philosophie
• Sémiotique et littérature
• Literaturwissenschaft

Language

• eng
• ita
• eng

Summary

• In The Empty Cage, the highly regarded Italian literary critic Carla Benedetti explores the question: What is an author? Expanding Foucault's arguments beyond literary discourse into art, film, performance, and industrial design, Benedetti maintains that the author carries out a historical function, integrally connected to the modern system of artistic production and of aesthetic evaluation. In the modern period, she says, any object can be considered a work of art, on the supposition that it has been produced by an author. Her book, far from being an attempt to reclaim authorial intention as essential, proposes an original theory that shows how the author, in the form of author-images and even logos, has become an important link in the modern system of artistic communication
• Discussing authors who include Borges, John Cage, Calvino, Duchamp, Proust, and Cindy Sherman, Benedetti addresses the principal aesthetic problems of modernity, showing how late modernity approached and refashioned them. She suggests that the author has become metaphorically a diagnostic expression of all of modernity's maladies, that part of a sick organism into which all symptoms of the illness converge. Thus she sees the author's death (and with it postmodernity as a whole) as a great "work of mourning" produced by a tired Western modernity; a mourning for what it no longer believes to be possible: that is, to grow and to generate. --Publisher's description

Member of

• Ombra lunga dell'autore

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

801

Illustrations

• illustrations
• plates

Index

index present

LC call number

PN175

LC item number

.B4613 2005

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography