What? Authorship is an unstable idea and not a fixed category? Really? This class examines the construction of the modern author, exploring the relationship between books and the people who produce and read them. We will begin at the end, with Pynchon and Calvino, with postmodern works that point out the fault lines between the text and the author, the reader and the real. We will then survey ideas about authors and readers from the Renaissance through the modern period, with short selections from authors like Cervantes, Shakespeare, Swift, Blake, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Wolfe, and Fitzgerald. We will also have a look at the material book and how it is made and read important theoretical contributions to the discussion. The course will finish up with a twenty-first-century book that deals with the idea of authorship, Ian MeEwan¿s Atonement.