Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Christina Friend
Abstract
The following dissertation examines how what Michel Foucault calls the “author function” affects contemporary students of writing and examines some historical alternatives to this way of conceptualizing the writing process and the writer’s role in it. Chapter 1: Author (Dys)function describes the author function and its discontents, the problems of the Romantic conception of “genius,” and summarizes the following chapters. Chapter 2: Early Writing Instruction focuses on classical approaches to rhetorical instruction that emphasize habit and aim at the cultivation of a particular subjectivity characterized by the capacity to respond to shifting rhetorical situations; this chapter draws on the work of Debra Hawhee and introduces the concept of “porous” vs. “buffered” selves from philosopher Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age. Chapter 3: “A readie and deliberate brain” describes early modern rhetorical instruction, making an argument that approaches to composing literature in the period were informed by rhetoric and the valuation of wit, rather than genius as in the Romantic era; part of this difference in values is the early modern reliance on external materials for the related rhetorical virtues of invention, amplification, and wit, a value that we’ll see paralleled in the next chapter’s subject, William S. Burroughs. Chapter 4: The embodied inventions of William S. Burroughs argues for Burroughs’s relevance as a theorist of rhetoric, examines some of his literary interventions in discourse, and examines his use of cut-ups and other “external” methods of invention, presenting Burroughs as a sort of neo-classical figure who embodied the “porous” self approach to creativity in the 20th century and whose theories of discourse anticipate 21st century media environments Chapter 5: Encounters with Difference asks what rhetoric and creative writing can learn from improvisation as practiced in other fields, notably that of music, returning to the threads developed in the early writing instruction chapter to argue that the capacity for improvisation is a bodily art conditioned through practice.
Rights
© 2025, Jonathan Brent Butler
Recommended Citation
Butler, J. B.(2025). Invention Beyond the Author. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8569