"Author"/"Pirate": Literary theory in the global commerce in ideas
"Author"/"Pirate": Literary theory in the global commerce in ideas
FOREIGN LITERATURE STUDIES 30 (4): 140-154 AUG 2008
China's rich history of communal ownership of ideas places scholars specializing in Chinese literary theory In a unique position to reflect critically on today's alarming trend toward privatization in the sphere of ideas, information and knowledge. This trend is being driven by U. S. and E. U. software, entertainment and pharmaceutical industries, and China is today one of the chief targets of their campaign against information sharing. This essay focuses on the role that modern European literary theory has played in this trend. At the center of copyright and patent law is an individualistic model of creativity-termed "authorship" and "invention," respectively-which the law has inherited from literary theory, specifically, the body of theory that has come down to us from European Romanticism. In literary studies in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism this individualistic vision has been giving way to more collaborative models of creative activ! ity, but the same cannot be said for the law. The essay examines how Romantic rhetoric operates in present-day copyright to construct authorial "others" such as the back, the plagiarist, and the pirate. The larger aim of the essay is to draw scholars specializing in Chinese literary theory into a growing international research collaborative devoted to the history and theory of intellectual property.
FOREIGN LITERATURE STUDIES 30 (4): 140-154 AUG 2008
China's rich history of communal ownership of ideas places scholars specializing in Chinese literary theory In a unique position to reflect critically on today's alarming trend toward privatization in the sphere of ideas, information and knowledge. This trend is being driven by U. S. and E. U. software, entertainment and pharmaceutical industries, and China is today one of the chief targets of their campaign against information sharing. This essay focuses on the role that modern European literary theory has played in this trend. At the center of copyright and patent law is an individualistic model of creativity-termed "authorship" and "invention," respectively-which the law has inherited from literary theory, specifically, the body of theory that has come down to us from European Romanticism. In literary studies in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism this individualistic vision has been giving way to more collaborative models of creative activ! ity, but the same cannot be said for the law. The essay examines how Romantic rhetoric operates in present-day copyright to construct authorial "others" such as the back, the plagiarist, and the pirate. The larger aim of the essay is to draw scholars specializing in Chinese literary theory into a growing international research collaborative devoted to the history and theory of intellectual property.
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