cfp.english.upenn.edu

Mapping Authorship

Seminar Organizer: Paige Sweet (University of Minnesota)

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2012

Note: You must submit your papers through the ACLA website: http://acla.org/submit/index.php

Questions may be address to paige.sweet@gmail.com

This panel seeks to examine the conflicted terrain between literary studies that document the death and/or function of the author on the one hand and legal, cultural, and technological cases that decry various forms of piracy that violate an originary authorial (textual) body on the other. Is piracy the other of authorship, or is it another form of authorship? In what ways do legal factors (such as copyright) condition how we legitimate creativity? How does one’s geopolitical location affect one’s relationship to authorial legitimacy and/or intellectual property rights? Are there alternative models of creativity and/or ownership that can more adequately account for new forms of creative and technological production?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Comparative analyses of authorship, especially from non-western contexts
• Shifting notions of intellectual property in the knowledge economy
  Specific case studies in any medium (film, literature, new media, etc.)
• Historical analyses of authorship, piracy, or copyright
  Scientific authorship and patents
• Intellectual property and the “new” or “second” enclosure
• Biopiracy
• Intellectual property and the commons
• The sexual or orientalist tropes of authorship and/or piracy
• The intersection of anti-piracy and anti-terrorist discourses

SEMINAR KEYWORDS: authorship, piracy, intellectual property, creativity, ownership, copyright, technology, science, biotechnology, biopiracy, patents, enclosure, public domain, copyleft, knowledge economy, commons