insert witty title here

I'm too tired to come up with a witty title...or even a relevant one.
So I'll progress directly to my response to the reading.

I feel like there was a lot going on here, a lot being said, and a lot of different angles being taken on the same basic question. However, very little of it stood out to me. Maybe I read the wrong chapters, sadly I did not have the time to read every chapter in the book. However, the one thing that did really grab my eye (maybe because it occurred early in the book before my mind became completely oversaturated with endless permutations of author and auteur) was Janet Staiger's discussion of the "issue of agency in authorship" (51). Questions of agency are among the most interesting to me. I've gotten the impression that I give a lot more thought to my own personal agency and the ways in which it is affected in social interactions and the ways in which I can preserve a sense of it, even in the face of disempowering situations.

I felt that Staiger's discussion of agency tied in very nicely both to Marchessault's discussion of The Dead Author and Foucaultian concepts of power and resistence. She ends her discussion of "authorship as site of discourse" with the statement that "Agency needs to be reconceived" (50) and goes on to explain that the "point is that for many people in a nondominant situation, who is speaking does matter. A consequence of feminism, identity politics, and queer theory has been the demand for a retheorization of agency within the advances of poststructuralist theory." (50) It is all very well to say that the identity of the author doesn't matter if that author happens to have a hegemonically priviledged identity, that is to say, an identity which is more or less taken as a given. For all the social advances that have been made, when we think of "an author" or "The Author" I imagine that the image the phrase conjures is of an older white male of a generally academic appearance. If the author happens to be an older white male academic, than one might get away with saying that the author's identity isn't important, because his identity is a moot point, it is already ingrained in our psyche. However, when the author is a member of a marginalized community then their identity may matter a great deal in regards to the topic, treatment, reception, and breadth and locus of circulation of the work in question. As was discussed last week, claiming the death of the author, though precieved by many as a liberatory statement, can, in fact be a tool for controlling the amount of authority a marginalized individual can claim by virtue of being an author.

While I, by no means, believe that the totality of a text and it's absolute incontrivertable meaning can be found in the body/person/personality/history/etc. of it's author nor her/his statments regarding the meaning of the text (nor really that any such thing can be found at all) I do believe that the individual author *does* matter as a social actor. Though as problematic as any social approach I think there is much of value in identity politics, especially for members of marginalized communities and that we should be very wary of any attempts to erase these matters through the purported death of the author.