In his book The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge proposes the concept of “Authoredness”. Compared with the traditional theory of “Authorship”, the concept of “Authoredness” reveals the core role of readers’ presupposition of creative intentions in the generation of literary meaning. Attridge points out that “Authoredness” does not refer to the author’s real identity, but a functional presupposition that readers inherently assume that the text was created by a human mind during the reading process. This presupposition originates from the historical construction of creative acts in social culture, enabling readers to imaginatively participate in the creative process through the text’s linguistic structure, narrative strategies, and other creative traces, and attribute the text’s “Inventiveness” to a fictional creative subject. Unlike the empirical reduction method emphasized by “Authorship”, “Authoredness” focuses on how readers construct the image of the “implied author” through symbols, thereby breaking through the limitations of Roland Barthes’ theory of “The Death of the Author”.
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Shen, M. (2025) Keyword in literary theory: Authoredness. Global Education Bulletin, 2(2), 6-11.