The Ascension of the Author and Ecologies of Knowledge A New Theoretical Framework

In the last couple of decades of the 20th century, "the death and return of the author" routine tirelessly haunted the field of literary studies. More often than not, however, these two narratives seem to have been structured around metaphors and lines of reasoning already firmly established in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by seminal thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Consequently, this paper will analyze the relations between contemporary authorship theories and practices, on the one hand, and globalization and digitization, on the other, trying to show how a new authorial regime could be studied through the lens of informational ecologies.