Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession on Potentiality and Singularity

The post-modern conviction that meaning is indeterminate and self is an illusion, though fascinating and defensible in theory, leaves a number of scholarly and pedagogical questions unsatisfied. Authoring the phenomenological act or felt sense of creating a text is a remarkably black box, say Haswell and Haswell, yet it should be one of the central preoccupations of scholars in English studies. Not only can the study of authoring accommodate the social turn since post-modernism, they argue, but it accommodates as well conceptions of, and the lived experience of, personal potentiality and singularity.