Approaching Artaud  

"The movement to disestablish the "author" has been at work for over a hundred years. From the start, the impetus was - as it still is - apocalyptic: vivid with complaint and jubilation at the convulsive decay of old social orders, borne up by that worldwide sense of living through a revolutionary moment which continues to animate most moral and intellectual excellence. The attack on the "author" persists in full vigor, though the revolution either has not taken place or, wherever it did, has quickly stifled literary modernism. Gradually becoming, in those countries not recast by a revolution, the dominant tradition of h igh literary culture instead "of its subversion, modernism continues to evolve codes for preserving the new moral energies while temporizing with them."--Approaching Artaud, Susan Sontag