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From: Eliza {ez2470@daden.UoS.ac.uk}
To: Prof. August Barrington {barringtona@mansfield.ac.uk}
Date: September 14, 1988 - 07:49

Professor,

And what of those profecient in the language of poetry that wish to understand academic topics? Humanity is always so busy compartmentalising things into boxes that sometimes it starts to do so without thinking about the alternatives. People construct meaning in different ways. How you perceive the colour green is likely different to how you perceive green. Maybe you think of envy. I think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

If it were up to me, professor, I would not be studying a doctorate within a specific category. I believe that my research is cross-discipline, and therefore unfit to be restricted by the limitations placed on a specific subject. Why would I do away with the author? Why not. We've seen what the world looks like with them. The point of a doctorate is to contribute original knowledge. So I constantly ask what if? And in this case I ask, how does the hierarchy of creativity shift when we remove the blueprint and introduce something less well-defined.

You've just described life, professor.

The box... is life.

It is a settled vessel of defined physical parts and character traits. Where they all came from is a mystery. Who forged them into existence - we might never know. The box is life. It is narrative at a human-scale. It is what happens when story actually reflects reality.

The box contains a fixed set of objects whose authorship is deliberately indeterminate, so that meaning is generated through encounter and perception rather than retrieval of intention. Just like when you meet a new person for the first time. No one tells you what that person is meant to mean to you. You determine that for yourself based on your navigation of them and subsequent configuration of them into your life.

Regards,
Eliza.

From: Prof. August Barrington {barringtona@mansfield.ac.uk}
To: Eliza {ez2470@daden.UoS.ac.uk}
Date: September 14, 2021 - 07:37

Eliza,

Come now. You and I both know that the vessel with which meaning is contained is never incidental. Academic writing is required to be clear and concise, constructed with rigour and legibility in mind. Poetry, by contrast, thrives on compression, suggestion, and resonance. I’m not condemning it — I’m simply saying it does different work.

You may need to clarify your position here. Why dispense with authors at all? Your research sits squarely within Creative Writing, after all. Even a refusal of authorship is still a stance taken by someone. Barthes did not eliminate the author — he displaced them. There is a difference.

If everything is possible, nothing is. A lamp is defined as much by what it is not as by what it is. Boundaries are not merely restrictions; they are what allow meaning to cohere in the first place.

So I return to the box.

You describe it as settled, known, complete — and yet also as containing infinite paths, infinite readings, infinite origins. I’m struggling to reconcile those claims. If the box resists provenance, intention, and limitation, then what exactly does it contain? Objects? Fragments? Or simply the invitation to project?

I’m not asking this to be obtuse. I’m asking because, at present, the box risks becoming an empty centre — a metaphor so accommodating that it cannot push back. I mean - is it a metaphor, or is it actually a real box? For this to function as research, it must do more than gesture at indeterminacy. It must constrain it.

You don’t need to persuade me that certainty is an illusion. I’ve spent long enough in this discipline to know that already. But you do need to show me where the resistance lies — where the system says “no,” and therefore earns its “yes.”

Clarify that, and we may be getting somewhere.

Warm regards,
August Barrington

From: Eliza {ez2470@daden.UoS.ac.uk}
To: Prof. August Barrington {barringtona@mansfield.ac.uk}
Date: September 13, 1988 - 22:00

Professor Barrington,

Please, call me Eliza.

One person's rubbish is another person's treasure. You look down on lyricism as a means of communicating an academic idea, but would you condemn it in the throes of a poetry collection?

And destabilising the Author? No, nothing so meagre. I'm pulling into question the whole hierarchy of creativity itself. How do you destabilise something that might not even be there, or need to be there? Are Author.” necessary? Are they just architects of narrative?

As for the box. It is the Anti-Schrödinger's Box. Without known provenance it is a box of many paths. Its contents, many, tell of infinite possibilities. The box is known. Settled. It is the outside world that is indeterminate.

Maybe I made it.

Maybe you did.

Regards,
Eliza.

From: Prof. August Barrington {barringtona@mansfield.ac.uk}
To: E.Z. {ez2494@daden.UoS.ac.uk}
Date: September 11, 2021 - 08:12

Elizabeth,

I've read the outline. It sounds ambitious. Though I fear it also comes across quite lyrical at times. For the sake of academic clarity, I think it would be best to avoid 'pretty' chapter titles.

A few headers seem to suffer from the same ambiguity, but I'm drawn to two in particular -

– “A Note on the Author (or lack thereof)”

– “The Memories of a Dead Author.”

If you mean to destabilise authorship, then say so directly. If you mean something else, define it. Ambiguity may intrigue, but it will also frustrate your examiners.

And since we are circling the term: I still don’t know who authored this box you describe. Was it you? Someone else? A found object? A collaboration?

Warm Regards,
August Barrington