Articles

Ghostly Collaboration: the Authorship of False Criminal Confession

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Abstract

Drawing on a body of confession scholarship, “Ghostly Collaboration” defines “coercive ghostwriting,” an authorship-inspired term for collaborative practices enacted between custodial criminal suspects and professional police interrogators resulting in coerced, potentially false confession. Within the United States, still-prominent notions of a Romantically-influenced autonomous Author problematically intersect with public perception of collaborative texts; the coercive ghostwriting label is intended to draw explicit attention to co-authorship via coercive collaboration, hopefully contributing to the ongoing efforts of researchers working to challenge inaccurate views of false confessions.

Keywords: collaborative authorship, criminal confession, language, the autonomous author

How to Cite:

Laughlin, M., (2014) “Ghostly Collaboration: the Authorship of False Criminal Confession”, Authorship 3(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v3i2.1088