Translation quality puts reader in position of decoding somewhat or retranslating with the result that one studies, not reads, the chapter;"thick scholarship" with careful, meticulous historical references to several kinds of sources, avoids overreaching conclusions, very tentative (reflected in the embedded style of sentences full of parentheses) - backtracking back and forth among centuries...not always a nice neat chronological tracing, but a continuous going forward and then looking back to see how we got there--makes it difficult to follow at times.
Chartier begins by indicating "the gap" in earlier histories of print from the 14th to 18th century in which the reader and writer generally do not figure. He goes on to show how several approaches to bibliographic and literary studies (which are in stark contrast to New Critical approaches) are reconnecting the author with the text. The following approaches show the idea of an author as dependent (not the sole master of the meaning of the text and the sole determiner of the meaning of the text) and as constrained (by the facts of literary production).
First, he explains Foucault's ideas of author-function by mentioning that at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century rules and ideas about authorship underwent a change. Foucault's author-functions
In the rest of the chapter Chartier shows how the emergence of an author-function is more complicated and a more longstanding tradition that what Foucault seems to indicate. Chartier is interested in Foucault's notion of authors being linked to scientific and NOT literary writing in the Middle Ages in contrast to authors being linked to literary, rather than scientific work in the late 18th and 19 century. At the end of the chapter, with many detailed examples, Chartier shows this was not necessarily the case for either time.
writing not always seen as author's property; printing is a privilege granted to booksellers by the sovereign for a specified number of years. -
Compromise reached in 1790s by several famous writers: new definition of work so that although ideas belong to all, the individual expression belongs to the author. Now the text is clearly and closely linked to the individual author (see 36-7). New paradox: "the poetic or philosophic work became a negotiable commodity..." AND "The work was held to result from a free and inspired activity motivated by its internal necessities alone" (37) New idea of authorship leads from patronage to commercialism - Moves from dependence on patron to independence of creativity - Move from seeing writing as not meshing at all with making money (wealthy writers, writers paid by patrons) to see writing as labor that deserves to be paid for. Print frees the writer to make money - One step along the way from patronage to profit for authors was noted by Chartier to show what a gradual process this way. Very often in the 1600s, the author would be given several "free" copies of the book, but no cash, and the patron would still be his/her sources of financial support and would still be prominently featured on the title page of the book.
Compared to different definition of author in Middle Ages (in manuscript or in print). Chartier uses the first two catalogues of French authors (compiled by La Croix du Maine) to demonstrate this - contain biographies of authors, arranged by authors' names. Authors and control: portraits, contracts Chartier looked at the way in which authors appeared in the portraits included in printed copies of their work. The portrait again stressed the connection of the individual writer to the work in ways that were new. (1) The author was not dictating to someone else, and (2) we see the author coming up with a new "invention," not a continuation of an existing work. Using Petrarch as an example, Chartier shows how the poet's idea of an original "author's book" done in the author's own hand was to function as a standard for copyists in a very early version of the author-function. Here again, it is clear that the intention of the author was to be considered. (Previously, works were copied by readers, put into various orders, etc. much like the way that many use information from the web.) I believe that this is what Chartier refers to as the link between the codicological unit and the textual unit or the unity of a work and an object. The chapter ends very tentatively in trying to answer the question "What is an author?" He stresses that a history of the book "in all its various dimensions" is the complicated and scholarly way to an answer and indicated that he is simply staking out areas for possible future study. The author-function, inscribed in the books themselves, ordering all attempts to establish textual classifications commanding the rules for the publication of texts, is henceforth at the centre of all questions linking the study of the production, forms and readers of texts.