The Phenomenology of Honest Authorship

The strongest counter-argument to Woodmansee's historicization is phenomenological: the writer who labors over a sentence until it sounds right, who feels the specific satisfaction of finding the word she was reaching for, who experiences the text as an extension of herself — this writer is not deluded. She is experiencing something genuine about the relationship between a consciousness and its expression. The constructionist analysis cannot explain this experience away. The response is not that the experience is illusory but that the experience is compatible with multiple explanatory frameworks. The feeling of creative ownership is real. The Romantic interpretation of the feeling — that it is evidence of singular interior origination — is optional. The post-Romantic framework preserves the phenomenology while replacing the metaphysics.