Suspended Authorship: Narratorial Takeover in Translation, Adaptation, and Documentary Storytelling

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grants Program 2025-2027

Who is the author of a poem published in translation with no original text available? Of a memoir that is supposed to be edited from a celebrity’s own testimony but is more likely concocted by the ghostwriter? Whose is the story that a film-maker adapts from a novel without acknowledging the literary source? And who authors those autobiographical accounts that are turned into books of oral history or autofiction? The principal objective of the project is to come to terms with such samples of problematic, or “suspended,” authorship by using interdisciplinary toolkits of narrative and translation studies. Qualifying those samples theoretically and fact-checking each through archival research, we aim to enrich our understanding of authorship as such, which is never to be taken for granted. What we propose to call “narratorial takeover” occurs every time a work evades its proclaimed authorial attribution, so what we discover in this study will serve to explain a multiplicity of analogous cases.