The question of fidelity, which has long been at the center of adaptation studies, pertains to the problem of authorship. Who can be an author and adapt a text and who cannot? In order to understand the problem of fidelity, this thesis asks larger questions about the problems of authorship, examining how authorship is changing in new media. Audiences are taking an ever-increasing role in the creation and interpretation of the texts they receive: a phenomenon this thesis refers to as participatory authorship, or the active participation of audience members in the creation, expansion, and adaptation of another's creative work. In order to understand how audiences are creating texts, first the place of the player within video games is addressed. Due to the nature of the medium, players must become active co-creators of a video game. Drawing a parallel between video game players and performance, it is argued that players must simultaneously perform and author a text, illustrating the complex and multilayered nature of authorship in video games. In the second chapter the role of the fan is examined within the context of the My Little Pony fandom, Bronies. Like players, fans take an active role in the creation of the text and destabilize the traditional notion of authorship by partially controlling of a text from the original author. By examining the place of the player and the fan the traditional notion of authorship is destabilized, and the more open and collaborative model of participatory authorship is proposed.

This thesis is a project which investigates the science of stylometry and wordprints; the analysis of writing style characteristics. The focus is placed on reexamining a wordprint study done by Wayne Larsen and Alvin Rencher wherein the Book of Mormon was analyzed against texts by those who are purported to have written it. The difference in this study from the first was that new wordprint definitions were developed using a junction grammar program created by Eldon Lytle, the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon was employed as the base text, the phrase "it came to pass" was deleted and the texts used in analysis were divided into narrative and discourse groups and analyzed separately.The results of the thesis show conclusively that the idea of wordprints being able to identify uniqueness in authors is indeed valid. The tests on the control groups show this. This was then applied to the Book of Mormon authors and a test made which was significant; indicating that no one individual could have authored the text. This was true not only for the wordprint as defined in the Larsen/Rencher study, but for each new definition derived from the junction grammar program. Other tests were performed which showed that Joseph Smith could not have authored any part of the Book of Mormon.

According to Stangl (1994), Jalongo (2002), Richards and Miller (2005) and a host of other authors regarding publishing in educational journals, understanding the audience for an article is of utmost importance. Huff (1999) notes that an author must understand the audience for whom s/he writes. While much of this understanding of audience comes down to suitable topics (Silverman, 1982), articles must also fit the style of the journal to which it is being presented (Olsen, 1997). With this in mind, the purpose of this study is to characterize the writing style of academic writing in education. This research will involve exploring and analyzing various education and research journals, and through an analysis of individual education articles, delineating the writing style for academic writing in education. By looking at the various components of writing style, a writing style or various writing styles found in scholarly writing in education was determined. It was found that there is a definite style in academic writing in education with two other distinct subsets--journals associated with specific associations and journals with a purely quantitative focus. It is suggested that specific curriculum and instruction in writing style be added to the current study of research.

This dissertation defines and analyzes the primary attributes of a new sub-genre of contemporary fiction: the Henry James novelization. Novels by Colm Tóibín, Cynthia Ozick and Alan Hollinghurst, among dozens of others, turn James into a fictional protagonist, while drawing upon his distinctive literary style, treatment of human psychology, and personal history. James as represented in these fictions is secretive, cripplingly self-aware and obsessed with others' opinions. Above all, he is preoccupied with controlling narratives. Because these works combine biographical and thematic approaches, the Jamesian author-protagonist displays aspects of James's own life, while sharing attributes of his own fictional creations. Thus a principal character type in these works is the addictive personality, as authors like Tóibín invoke the history of alcoholism in the James family, as well as the manipulative yet self-divided creations for which James was famous. The Introduction traces the literary representation of historical authors from the Greek epic through the postmodern novel and explains why Henry James is such an attractive subject for novelization. Chapter One discusses Colm Tóibín's The Master, which represents James gathering material for The Golden Bowl and other late novels. Both Tóibín's James and James's Maggie Verver display personalities that bear the imprint of family pathology, specifically, alcoholism and abuse, and both inhabit communities where moral culpability becomes difficult to assign. Chapter Two treats Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation," a novel about the composition of The Jolly Corner which portrays the Jamesian author as one among various technologies of writing. As James loses control over his narrative, The Jolly Corner becomes a trauma dream in which Spencer Brydon uncannily prefigures the alcoholic in recovery. In Chapter Three, Alan Hollinghurst replaces James with a flawed stand-in, shifting the focus to James's legacy and the state of humanities study today: Nick Guest is engaged in writing a dissertation on James and a screenplay adaptation of The Spoils of Poynton. At the end of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest has learned the lesson taught by all these novelizations: that James's texts remain deeply, urgently relevant.

Documentaries are often understood as authentic representations of reality. Ignorance when it comes to the constructive and sometimes manipulative nature of documentaries can lead to a continued reproduction of historically dominating ideologies, affecting the representation of certain people and issues. The aim of this study is therefore to contribute to a deeper understanding of how narratives are and can be constructed in documentary films (RQ1) as well as what this type of analysis can teach us about documentary authorship (RQ2). By looking at the documentary Meeting the man: James Baldwin in Paris as a specific case, the study attempts to draw conclusions about authorship and narrative constructions in documentaries in general. The theoretical framework is based on a social constructivist understanding of the field and consists more specifically of narrative, discursive and semiotic theory. The methods for analysis are narrative analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis, as well as semiotic analysis.  The study found that there is a distinct conflict between the narrative constructed by the film's director Terrence Dixon and the film's subject, James Baldwin. The different narratives are realized through a combination of visual and verbal discourses. Following things could be concluded; Dixons narrative strives to exclude Baldwin as an author, from his sociocultural and historical context. Baldwin, on the other hand, constructs a narrative which argues for its impossibility. In addition to this, documentary authorship is dependent on how much context the different discourses are given as well as what the context reveals. The ability to serve as an author is then determined by the power given to conduct reflexive narratives.

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<p>This thesis deals with Soren Kierkegaard's understanding of reason and· faith. Whereas the reader may be unfamiliar with his works, I have elected to begin my discussion with an introduction to their authorship. Bringing knowledge of the authorship to bear on the question at hand, I aim to elucidate the respective viewpoints of three of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors, namely: Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus and Johannes Anti-Climacus.</p> <p>Summarizing these three presentations finally with reference to the major autographic works, including his Journals and Papers, I aim to clarify Kierkegaard's point of view and understanding respecting the nature of reason and faith and their relation in a Christian's life.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Several literary historians have discussed how literary authorship became a profession in America. The act of imaginative writing evolved, by the middle of the nineteenth century, from an amateur pursuit into a big business. The rapid commercial growth of letters after the Civil War meant that American writers could realize themselves precisely as literary professionals who often performed no other sorts of work and who were publically respected for their “writerly” work. However, our historiography glosses over the widespread cultural confusion and skepticism in Gilded Age America over the legitimacy of literary work and the rightful status of literary authors as workers in the nineteenth century’s newly emergent social hierarchy of labor. Scholars have not accounted for one of the central tensions of late-nineteenth century American literature: as fiction writing evolved into a professional, commercial activity, and, thus, a potentially viable way to earn a living, many of America’s most successful and otherwise significant writers struggled against pervasive public assumptions that challenged the notion of writing as “real” work. My dissertation is essentially a study of ideas about the work of writing in America from the Civil War to World War I, when American authors were thinking about literary authorship increasingly in vocational terms. In particular, my study explores how professional writers understood the nature and meaning of their literary endeavors in a culture that often refused to recognize those endeavors as work. I demonstrate how Gilded Age authors, operating within a fully professionalized business of letters, conceived of the nature of their work and its relation to the work performed by others. My project responds to the gap outlined above by offering a new account of postbellum authorship, one that foregrounds the influence of what might be called “vocational anxieties” on the careers of three representative Gilded Age writers: William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Jack London. The term “vocational anxieties” describes the acute sense of worry shared by countless American writers who faced the cultural assumption that writing was not work and, therefore, writers were not actual workers. My dissertation also looks at the inherent conflicts created for professional writers by the mass literary marketplace, the commercial conditions of which thrust literary artists into the new and, often times, uneasy role of literary businessmen and businesswomen. My project explores the nature of these problems and, in particular, the ways in which Howells, Chesnutt, and London responded to them. The heart of my argument is that cultural suspicions about the literary enterprise caused a transition of authorial consciousness, whereby an array of American authors tried to define themselves, foremost, as laborers, and the act of imaginative writing as an authentic form of work. Each chapter in my dissertation explores the respective attempts made by Howells, Chesnutt, and London to rhetorically reconstruct his own literary work by linking it to and, in some cases, mediating it through various modes of socially, ethically purposive work or, in other cases, often simultaneously, through physically strenuous labor, such as industrial work, artisanal work, craft production, factory work, and agricultural work. Ultimately, my account of Gilded Age authorship suggests that the story of American letters from the Civil War to the First World War amounts to a romance with literary labor. My project is both a work of literary history and a limited cultural history of ideas about authorship, as practiced by Howells, Chesnutt, and London. Much of my study features a sustained analysis of “non-literary” and some literary sources, many of which have previously gone unexamined, usually composed by the authors themselves. Combining historicist and new historicist insights, I make my case with the help of source materials, including private letters, public speeches, journal entries, newspaper and magazine articles, theoretical tracts, and travel accounts. Chapter One, “Introduction,” foregrounds the essential questions sketched above. I contextualize my dissertation within the existing field of authorship studies. Furthermore, I explain my methodologies before providing a brief history of ideas about work and the work ethic in American culture prior to the Civil War. Chapter Two, “’Merely a Working Man’: William Dean Howells and the Aesthetics of Vocational Anxiety,” redirects our attention to the ways in which Howells’s development as a novelist and critic was shaped by cultural and personal doubts about the work of writing. His longstanding image as a complaisant literary aristocrat ignores the fact that he was tormented throughout his life by deeply rooted vocational anxieties. The chapter argues that Howellsian Realism was a response to and an expression of these doubts. It traces the key strategies underlying Howells’s career-long campaign to revalorize the vocation of literary authorship, strategies which included recasting writers and literary texts along socially purposive lines. Redefining himself and other writers as laborers, and the writing process as strenuous work, was the other part of that campaign. In Chapter Three, “’I would gladly devote my life to the work’: Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Limits of Literary Reform,” I argue that his artistic aspirations diverged from his political concerns shortly after the press deemed him one of America’s most promising black authors. Chesnutt desired recognition as a literary artist untethered from his reputation as a famous Race Man. As his authorial career advanced, he found it increasingly difficult to square his artistic ambitions with the social expectations placed on him as a public black intellectual. Chesnutt strove to release himself from the entrenched literary expectations and cultural designations imposed on fin de siècle black authors. Put another way, he fought to create an artistic identify--for he and other black writers--beyond the boundaries of the African American literary tradition he inherited. African American writers would take up his dilemma, which amounted to the question of whether to write “for his race” and for his own artistic ambitions, in every subsequent generation. Chapter Four, “’Not afraid to work, work, work’”: Labor, Craft, and the Literary Career of Jack London, reframes London as a disciple of Howells, insofar as he adopted the Howellsian writing as labor ideology, recasting postbellum writers at once as laborers and skilled artisans. But unlike Howells, whose genteel image and lifestyle separated him from the workaday world, London used his personal life to collapse the boundaries between the distinct worlds of art and labor. He created the model for the man of letters as a man of action. Throughout his literary career, London played up his “anti-literary” public persona, posing as an adventuresome man of the world who chanced to earn his living by his pen. The chapter highlights the unresolved tension between London’s evolving notions of literary artistry and craft and his vocational and masculine anxieties, which compelled him to publicly endorse the notion of writing as industrial labor long after he considered himself a careful literary craftsman. Chapter Five, “Epilogue: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Problems of Modern Authorship” reiterates the study’s main claims and articulates it’s broader significance within the fields of literary and work studies. / English