Why authorship is important

Article by Liam Geoghegan. Edited by Harriet Di Francesco. 

After deciding to leave the theme for issue 6 of New Histories open, my mind suddenly went blank. It has taken me a good couple of weeks to think of something to write. This is strange, not only because the idea behind an open-themed issue was to allow writers more space for independent thought, but also because in five previous issues I have written on the set theme only twice. Even so, as for many others (I imagine), the unlimited freedom proved more constricting than one might think. 

This train of thought led me (eventually) to my topic of choice: authorship. It seems to me that authorship is often one of the most important aspects of a given piece of writing or art in general. Whether the text is History, a film-script, a poem, a novella, or an advert – you name it; I would argue that the author is important. I would happily watch any film written by Quentin Tarantino, good review or not; happily listen to any song by Page, Plant and Jones, technically good or not. I won’t even bother picking up a novel by Stephanie Meyer (and probably never will), even though I bought and read the first in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris (anyone not following this really needs to start paying attention to the current vampire “craze”). Ironically, Harris is an awful writer and whoever adapted her texts for the screen deserves a medal for just how good True Blood turned out. On the other hand, I have no interest in text or adaptation when it comes to Twilight, even though I have been assured both are very good. In fact, I would most-likely never read a Meyer book about vampires, or anything else for that matter. 

My particularly long-winded point here is that a name on a book cover says everything. John Terry might happen to be an excellent writer (this is all hypothetical, of course), but I wouldn’t go near his book if he wrote one. If I was somehow tricked into reading his book and it turned out to be a good read, I would probably question the authorship immediately. My reaction would not be: “well, he has come from a culture rich in literary style and tradition, it’s no wonder he can write so well.” Instead, I’d be thinking: “he’s a footballer and a bit of an idiot for Pete’s sake, surely someone else must have…” So why is it that we seem to have moved away from such an aggressive questioning of the individual authorship of historical sources? 

Even in the earliest secondary school History lessons that I remember, we were taught to look at four things relating to a source: who wrote it, when they wrote it, why they wrote it, and what they wrote. The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed the “linguistic turn” (or the “cultural turn” as it is also known). This was a shift towards a closer examination of language in all things historical. When looking at sources, professional academic historians began to place a lot more emphasis on the When, Why and What, and not so much on the Who. Nowadays, the Who in this analysis no longer seems to refer to a single entity, but to a movement; a group, society, or culture. The only reason that the Who wrote the What, and most importantly Why they wrote it the way they did, is because of the culture that they came from. They (consciously or not) tapped in to their contemporary society. 

At first glance, it seems that this removes some of the emphasis from the question of authorship. On closer inspection, however, the opposite is true. I originally tried to write this article with a very different ending. I argued that historians have lost something by not concentrating on individual authors and looking instead at the cultural backdrop in which authors had written. However, when reading this piece back to myself, I had got to about this stage when I realised that since the linguistic turn, historical focus had actually shifted more on to the question of authorship. Who wrote the piece is now of the utmost importance. Not just anyone can have written a particular source. An author needs to have been exposed to certain cultural features in order to have written in a certain way. Yes, the discourse that they use or that they engage with must already exist within a culture or a society. But each individual will respond differently to said discourse, depending on their own particular social experiences. 

And it is this that makes authorship so important. It is also why this article became a ramble about writing, rather than a focused argument against a feature of current history writing. Maybe we should start to sign our work in a different way in light of these ideas, in order to aid the research of future historians. Rather than: by Liam Geoghegan, I think I should be signing like so: by a male, 21 years old, a student, white, British, straight, middle-class, in a relationship, fond of cheese and chocolate (although not together), banks with Barclays, emails via Google, a fan of Led Zeppelin and the Clash, currently reading a Stephen Fry novel, typing on a Dell laptop, sitting in a room in Sheffield…etc etc. Or maybe I’ll just stick with Liam Geoghegan and let the historians of the future have their fun with trying to work out why on earth I wrote such a piece…

← Back to Volume 1

← Back to Issue 6