Author—Anonymous and Distributed

Abstract

The study of authorship faces a wilderness of extant forms, alive and open to interpretation. The first of these—anonymous—takes us into the vast archive of texts absent the author function. It includes the myriad of faceless, unsigned texts and those signed by masked authors, whose very function is to remove authorial identity from consideration. The second—collective—contains texts produced in collaboration, across time and space. More than a person, the author in that sense comprises a system, which embodies social and technological components. Against this archive, the presence of a single named author seems to be an anomaly rather than the default it often feigns in literary history.