Kundera and the Ambiguity of Authorship (MHRA Texts and Dissertations)

The scholarly debate about authorship has not only transcended all aspects of literary studies, but has also prompted contemporary authors to counter, subvert, and challenge it. One author to whom this applies in particular is Milan Kundera. In this study, Christine Knoop re-examines Kundera's essayistic and novelistic work against the background of the theoretical paradigms of literary authority, intention, and ownership. In so doing, she demonstrates how he overcomes traditional theoretical distinctions by postulating the existence of both a strong, powerful author figure and of potentially boundless literary meaning. Kundera's radically ambiguous conception of the author in the novel, developed primarily to influence the reader, is discussed and developed to cast new light on the critical debate about authorship at large while maintaining his primary conjecture that authorship as such is perpetually hybrid, dynamic, and unfinished. Christine Angela Knoop is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Comparative Literature at Freie Universitat Berlin.