World Author: On Exploding Canons and Writing Towards More Equitable Literary Futures

This chapter explores how authorship plays out in literary texts and in the wider world. The starting premise is that canonical authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, function as focal points for the flow of both cultural and monetary value. The agency inherent within their `world author persona is accordingly distributed across a wide variety of actors. This leads to a much broader discussion of `world authorship as an extended process whereby literary writing both shapes and is shaped by the world(s) in which it exists. This process is headed up by individuals who are placed into an attitudinal relationship towards such activity, ranging from celebration through to satire an involving both human and non-human actors. I consider this first in theoretical terms, keying Goethes holistic understanding of how art and architecture intersect to concepts around `worlding, `authorship and `literary imagination, as developed by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Leslie Adelson respectively. I then examine the historical context of West German publishing and how the attitudinal `modes of authorship this particular context makes apparent prefigure a contemporary turn towards a broader model of authorship that is deliberately inclusive. The recent work of the prize-winning German-language writer, Katja Petrowskaja, which builds on deep-rooted global flows of people, concepts and things and points to new ways of accessing these through language, illustrates this point.