"Disputes, Disorders, and Confusion": Authorship, Remediation, and Intellectual Property Regulations in the Digital Age.

Abstract

In the last two decades, Western media production and consumption have been transformed by the permeation of digital technologies. While not new conventions, remediative techniques such as formal fracturing and intertextuality have become definitive of Digital Age storytelling. The prevalence of these techniques that encourage multimodal reading practices signal an epistemological shift centered on sharing and collaboration. I analyze a subset of contemporary literary works that integrate traditional media forms with Digital Age narrative techniques in ways that challenge individualistic notions of authorship perpetuated by intellectual property regulations. The convergence of feminist methods with legal scholarship, cultural theory, and new media studies guides my inquiries about the evolution of authorship in the Digital Age.

This project examines Digital Age storytelling techniques and synergistic audience engagements in a variety of contemporary literary works. Chapter 1 examines the way that Percival Everett’s experimental novel Erasure appeals to digital natives by using remediative techniques to investigate historical controversies about racialized masculinity and African American cultural production. In Chapter 2, I analyze Suzan-Lori Parks’ play with form and challenge to the conventions of drama in her performance text Venus as a means of destabilizing the performance of gendered racism. Chapter 3 explores the citational pleasures of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s graphic novel Lost Girls that emerge through remediations of public domain children’s stories. My reading of Lost Girls challenges intellectual property regulations that devalue remediative creative methods. Finally, Chapter 4 provides a close reading of the reader appeal created by the complex intertextual blending of artifacts in the DC Comics universe in Grant Morrison’s Batman titles. In addition, I scrutinize work for hire as a complicated model of authorship that sacrifices creators’ rights to generate greater income for publishers.

This project explores the growing tension between a public who increasingly validates remediation as a valuable creative method, and private institutions that hold onto outdated definitions of authorship that privilege the monopolization of ideas. Ultimately, this project calls for a more flexible approach to intellectual property that moves away from the privatization of ideas in favor of a more robust public domain.