**This course is offered in conjunction with the 2005-6 Center for Critical Analysis seminar, “Intellectual Property.” Students will have the opportunity to work closely with CCA fellows and visiting speakers, some of whom will be brought to campus to participate in our class.

In this course, we will examine the development of the idea of literary property within Anglo-American law and culture, paying particular attention to the role literature has played in defining and justifying intellectual property regimes. When did authorship emerge as a cultural formation and a criterion of value? Under what material and social conditions do authorship, ownership, and cultural authority coincide? How do literary texts reflect and reflect on the intellectual property systems that structure and limit their circulation? How might we plot the intersections of legal history and literary history? Can we bring the history of intellectual property and literary authorship to bear on current debates over public policy?

The course will be divided into three units, each of which will survey its topic from the early modern period forwards:

1. Histories and Theories of Authorship. We will begin by reading late 20 th century theoretical debates about authorship against the material and social practices that often serve as example or ground. Test cases for the theories of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida will include: Shakespeare and early modern authorship; the 17 th and 18 th century debate over Ancients and Moderns; romantic authorship; imitation and plagiarism; citation, quotation, and appropriation.
   
   
2. Histories and Theories of Copyright. In the middle weeks of the course we will study the history of Anglo-American copyright law from the Statute of Anne through recent American cases concerning property rights in software, popular music, genetic sequences, and indigenous culture. Readings will be drawn from statutory law, case law, legal scholarship, and literary and cultural studies, and will center on the Statute of Anne, the Copyright Act of 1790; 19 th-century copyright reform; transnational melodrama and international copyright; the 1909 copyright revision and the advent of recorded sound; new media and 20 th-century copyright.
   
   
3. Anti-authorship. We will conclude by examining literary and artistic practices that exceed or work to undermine individual authorship, including collaboration, eclecticism, forgery, literary hoaxes, automatic writing, collage, hypertext, and sampling.

Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of legal, theoretical, and literary texts, but will include: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Peter Stallybrass, Jeffrey Masten, Joan DeJean, Lyman Ray Patterson, Mark Rose, Susan Stewart, Jane Gaines, Lisa Gitelman, James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Richard Posner, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth, Edward Young, Thomas Chatterton, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, John Cage, Negativland, David Sanjek, Creative Commons.

Students will write short essays for each of the three sections of the course, one of which will be developed into a final paper of moderate length.