The Author Is Dead! (Long Live the Author!)
“All our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings,” Mark Twain mused while dictating his autobiography a century ago. In today’s age of repurposing, where the remix, the sample, the mash-up, the hypertext, the cut-and-paste, the blog, the adaptation, and the bricolage rule the day, and all cultural material seems free for the taking, the storytellers who understand and celebrate this old notion are often the ones with the newest and freshest stories to tell. Whatever medium they’re using, be it visual, aural, textual, or none of the above, our most intriguing storytellers know that their stories have lives beyond their creators, that stories belong to all of us, and that great works of art are oftentimes just particularly inspired retellings. In this issue, we look at storytellers who take what’s available to them and give us back work that’s more than the sum of its parts…
RES Vol. 8, No. 1
“New Syntax”
Jan/Feb 2005
