I am thrilled to be joining Intellect’s Book 2.0 as co-editor, with the extraordinary Tom Ue. It’s an honour to have been asked, and to take up this position from Volume 15 (2025).
Handing over the reins is founding editor Mick Gower, whose contributions cannot be overstated. Book 2.0 is a very special peer-reviewed academic journal, and I think the only one to consider books as physical objects. It is about literature and the processes that make it. Book design, production, and distribution are all considered alongside composition and craftmanship.
Our first issue together will be a special issue on the topic of authorship. This is something I proposed, because the widespread discourse around AI has changed, and continues to change, the way we think about authorship. Even before the last few years, I was longing to see some extended analysis of social media and the death of the author. But there is so much more, too, to talk about in this exciting age.
Anyway, the call for papers is here and reproduced below.
Special Issue: ‘The Author’
Authors mean different things at different times and in different contexts. For example, the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary conceives it as ‘[a] writer, and senses relating to literature’ and ‘[a] creator, cause, or source’. In 2004, Andrew Bennett suggested that ‘questioning the nature of authorship’ can be a hallmark of crises and turning points in literature.
Nearly sixty years after Roland Barthes declared ‘The Death of the Author’, conversations about AI dominate a range of discourses, and it can be increasingly challenging to determine what constitutes authorship and who or what we might consider an author and how. Can one, for example, co-write with ChatGPT? Can a natural language processing tool, with its changing methodologies and unfixed ethical frameworks, be an author? Who has a claim over the resultant intellectual property? How have fiction and poetry responded (or not) to these dynamics?
As critics, we might quickly single out discontinuities between the good old ‘then’ and the bad new ‘now’, but are there continuities between how earlier and how contemporary writers understand ‘The Author’? Can a single author ‘do’ different voices? If so, how? How do these debates speak to the ongoing crises in the humanities?
In celebration of fifteen years of Book 2.0 (Intellect Books) and dedicated to this peer-reviewed journal’s esteemed founding editor, Mick Gowar, Volume 15 Issue 1 will examine this construct and more. Articles and creative works of 4–5,000 words (prose) or 1–2,000 words (poetry) might address:
- Property
- Claims
- Litigation
- Gender
- Performance
- Class
- Authority
- Artificial intelligence
- Co-authorship
- Group authorship
- Anonymity
- Theft
- Coteries
- Writing circles
- Speech acts
- Resistance
- Tradition and revolution
Please submit your manuscript, with a 300-word abstract and eight keywords, to the new Co-Editors of Book 2.0: Drs Tom Ue (Cape Breton University) at ue_tom@hotmail.com AND J.C. Bernthal (University of Suffolk) at jamie@jcbernthal.com by 15 October 2024.
We welcome reviews of 1,500–2,500 words on related topics. Please contact the Editors before beginning a review to avoid overlaps and for more information about the journal’s review scope.
A link to Intellect’s style guide can be found here:
https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/2160/house-style-guide-6th-ed.-i.pdf.
All correspondence should be directed to BOTH Drs Ue AND Bernthal.
JC Bernthal 