Since the Jonah Lehrer scandal earlier this year, I've been more interested in the issue of authorship and its effect on how we read and interpret an author's work. While the issue with Lehrer was whether his plagarism in one instance invalidated his other work, this article instead looks at situations in which authors change their mind and retract their prior work. The article brings up a number of the difficult issues surrounding this issue especially in the digital age.
I think the author of this piece comes up with a reasonable approach: rather than try to forget the author ever wrote something that was retracted, instead we should use the retraction to help us better understand the work and interpret its meaning.
"When Authors Disown Their Work, Should Readers Care?" by Maria Konnikova
Published in the Atlantic, August 28, 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/when-authors-disown-their-work-should-readers-care/261615/
Eric
Interesting topic. It reminds me a bit of a common practice I've always hated: The posthumous publication or exhibition of a writer's personal papers and drafts. My feeling is that the author's work is considered desirable because of the reputation they had in life, and they built that reputation by working carefully and publishing selectively. It's nobody else's place to throw open their bedroom door in their absence to drag out something that's only half-dressed. I see it as a violation that disrespects a supposedly admired person, and one that can't be justified by arguments about the greater good or academic inquiry (or the profit motive of the surviving family). I realize it's only semi-related to the topic at hand here, but I'm always curious how other people feel about it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading the blog and for your thought-provoking comment. I may be making an artificial distinction here but nevertheless think that it may be important to separate an author's personal writings (letters, diary entries, etc.) from an author's drafts and other unpublished works.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think one could argue that an author's personal writings were never meant to be published, there is nevertheless a great deal to be learned from their availability. They provide pieces of a sort of autobiography that can improve knowledge about the author and his/her works. Obviously, there are questions about what should and shouldn't be published, but those seem to me to be judgement calls for the family or owners of the documents. But because these were generally completed works, albeit with a different intended audience, I think they are different from some of the other types of unpublished writings.
For drafts or partially-completed works, I do share your concern that it goes against the author's intention to only publish what he/she thought best represented his/her abilities as an author. At the same time, I think there is something to be said for the argument that access to these kinds of writings really do serve the goal of academic inquiry. It's a tough balance.
Maybe an alternative is for these materials to be made available only selectively such as at an archive (public or private). Hopefully scholars of an author could access these archives when doing larger projects -- this would help to ensure that these materials would be contextualized within larger studies of an author's work. That's obviously placing a lot of faith in academics and researchers, but it could be one way of trying to strike that appropriate balance.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this article!
Eric