This seminar aims to reconsider the critical concept of authorship from a strongly genealogical and transcultural perspective. While also focusing on world literature theories, considered as an effective tool to rethink contemporary authorship issues, it encourages at the same time proposals that aim to identify and deepen conceptions of the author coming from understudied historical and geographical contexts, thereby broadening the cultural horizon of Western reflections on the subject.

Indeed, we are mostly used to considering authorship as a romantic notion, strictly linked to the paradigm of genius and individuality, the authority of which was famously questioned by twentieth-century literary theory—relying primarily on such celebrated thinkers as Barthes and Foucault—before re-emerging in the post-structuralist era. However, other historical periods and cultures have not necessarily applied the same theoretical paradigms nor followed the same critical trajectory (think about collaborative or anonymous authorship in the Middle Ages, as well as the lack of the rhetoric of genius in most Far Eastern literary traditions, to give just a few non-exhaustive examples). In our opinion, it is therefore important to rethink the notion of authorship in the light of these divergent traditions, especially to ensure a more complex and multi-focal approach to it in an increasingly globalized literary context.

Even though theories of world literature have profoundly transformed the ways in which the critical field of literary studies is currently understood, we argue that, in fact, the crucial category of authorship has received comparatively little sustained attention within this debate. While effectively highlighting how substantial changes in the literary system have simultaneously reconfigured the author as a global cultural agent whose visibility depends on complex networks of publishing, mediation, and institutional recognition, the world literature perspective has less frequently questioned the Western theoretical framework of authorship as a productive and individual stance. We therefore suggest that merging genealogical reflections on authorship with world literature studies could help to make the latter much more inclusive and global, rather than a mere framework of Western concepts superimposed on the literatures of the rest of the world.

We welcome papers in English, French, Italian or Spanish. Possible topics include:

• authorship in world literature theories;
• the intersection of authorship, postcoloniality, and the global literary market;
• twentieth-century theories of authorship and their global afterlives;
• pre-modern, indigenous, and non-Western conceptualizations of the author;
• multilingual, exilic, diasporic, and transnational authorship.