The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (review)

Paul K. Saint-Amour. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. xiii + 281 pp.

Paul Saint-Amour’s new book is a rich consideration of western intellectual property law’s relation to creative works and of how several literary works are self-consciously engaged with contested copyright ideas. Both organizing categories are meticulously researched: of special interest for those looking to learn about the development of intellectual property law are the first two chapters. Chapter 1 performs a strong analysis of the rise of neoclassical economics as it pertains to the shift from a labor to a consumption theory of value, and of how that shift is reflected in notions of literary production and consumption and authorial identity and protections. Chapter 2 gives a smart, exhaustive account of the 1876–78 Royal Copyright Commission in England, whose final document—in spite of numerous dissenting appendices—seems to have initiated a series of legal decisions leading to ever “thicker” regimes of copyright protection, to the impoverishment of materials freely available in the public sphere.

After these chapters launch the book’s interdisciplinary combinations of “jurisprudence, economics, aesthetics, and politics,” it moves into chapters focused on Oscar Wilde, George Sylvester Viereck, and James Joyce. Chapter 3 examines Wilde’s orality, attitudes toward plagiarism and forgery, and the stylistic continuities of what might seem to be De Profundis’s departures from Wilde’s earlier irreverencies. The Viereck chapter balances nicely its consideration of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act with its examination of ideational vampirism, ghostliness, and the “great” individual vs. the masses in Viereck’s The House of the Vampire. Saint-Amour invokes Derrida’s “hauntology” to underscore a central threat of limited copyright to the “thick” privatization schemes of contemporary corporate culture: “As long as it remains a temporary form, intangible property . . . haunt[s] the hegemony of perpetual, tangible property.” The Joyce chapter persuasively analyzes the deliberate travesty of copyright evident in Ulysses, and particularly in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode. Finally, the conclusion considers two recent copyright-inflected works, a 1982 Spider Robinson short story and Alice Randall’s 2001 The Wind Done Gone, whose reimagining of Gone With the Wind provoked an ultimately unsuccessful copyright infringement suit.

As these summaries indicate, Saint-Amour works to combine his interests in western intellectual property laws, and the directions those laws might have gone and might still go, with his interest in “the literary property metadiscourse of late modernity.” The combination fruitfully registers the dangerous effects of increased copyright protections on creative freedoms, a danger Saint-Amour laments. At the level of local combinatory analysis—considering, for example, how attitudes toward plagiarism and Paterian pleasure interplay with the popularity of nineteenth-century centos—Saint-Amour is smart and provocative. His recurrent interest in the outrider status of both mourning and imaginative literature occasions many insights.

I’m not convinced, however, that this book takes on the second part of its subtitle, the “literary imagination.” Saint-Amour’s attention is to literary value and authorial identity: how does Anglo-American culture designate its “creative” products? How do authors negotiate their identities and the “originality” of their materials; how do they inscribe attitudes toward copyright in their literary works?

These are useful questions to ask, and they correlate with the difficulties that keep intellectual property law from easy finalities. Were Saint-Amour to have engaged with the literary imagination per se, the book might have theorized more profoundly (in the wake of, say, Barthes or Deleuze) about the nature of language as cultural property “held” by each literate individual. The ingredients of commensurate theorizing are arguably present in many details of this well-wrought book; but it’s precisely the author’s informed critical approaches—as well as my sympathy with his wish to enlarge the public sphere and “thin” copyright regimes—that makes me long for more satisfying theoretical visions. Such imaginative theorizing might have addressed Saint-Amour’s desire to approach what he calls “what-is-not-yet”: “dreaming through aesthetic projection toward ethical commitment.” For such a vision...