Excerpted from Larry McCaffery's Some Other Frequency

One direct corollary of the view that reality and our experience of reality are fundamentally discontinuous and interactive has been the replacement of the romantic conception of artistic creation and the Artistic Self -- that is, the work of fiction as a discrete entity produced in isolation by an autonomous author, who is solely responsible for the creation of meanings, which emerge out of his or her own unique set of experiences, attitudes, and perceptions -- by what might be termed the "textual assemblage" and the "textual 'I'" This is a model of textuality as a dynamic, open-ended, and fundamentally unstable system of codes, information, citations from and references to other books, other texts, other sentences. Such a model has far-reaching implications indeed, for it encourages authors to see the composition process as fundamentally collaborative, one that produces not a single meaning placed there by the author and retrievable by a careful reader, but a multiplicity of meanings and perspectives that are disseminated as its component features intersect and interact with other texts and contexts.