Punishing & Publishing the Author. Authorship, Individual Sin, and the Media, from Auctor to Auteur

The author has been cyclically proclaimed dead by critics, yet it remains at the center of modern Western judicial, aesthetic, and philosophical systems of belief and knowledge production. We explore some of the causes of this centrality and critically examine ways to uproot them. Our focus spans French and Non-French writings, films, and political documents from the Middle Ages to the 2023 Writers Guild strike against AI. Authorship is analyzed through the lenses of theories of sin and subjecthood, book culture and media ecologies, as well as theories of creativity, intertextuality, relationality, and reception.