The Annual International Post-Graduate HERMES Seminar welcomes contributions for the seminar ‘Author, Authorship, and Authority in the Age of Cultural Studies and New Media’, which will be held at Charles University in Prague, June 14-19, 2015.

In the past decades, the interest in textuality, contexts, readership and the historicity and materiality of literary production has tended to overshadow an important area of literary studies, namely research focused on the author, authorship and authority. The present time, marked by the predominance of cultural studies and the profound impact of new media on our understanding of authenticity, originality and intellectual property, invites us to reconsider the status, meaning and potentialities of author-oriented approaches. Starting from the Prague Structuralism discussions of authorship in terms of intentionality and “semantic gesture,” Wayne Booth’s “implied author,” E.D. Hirsch’s hermeneutics and Michel Foucault’s concept of a historically developing, discursive “author-function,” author-oriented approaches can be discussed from various conceptual perspectives and explored in a number of thematic areas, including, but not limited to:

Papers addressing reconfigurations of authorship in the context of new media are especially welcome. Paper proposals should be sent to Professor Martin Prochazka martin.prochazka@ff.cuni.cz, Head, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University in Prague. The submission deadline is December 31, 2014; selected participants will be notified by February 28, 2015.

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