His work as a theorist challenges the postmodern displacement of the self and reintroduces the author as a central concept in contemporary thought.
Burke’s fiction explores themes of alienation and addiction in claustrophobic settings such as the old Tiger Bay of his native Cardiff.
He was Reader in English Studies at the University of Durham where he taught from 1992-2006 and has since worked as a freelance writer At a time when continental theorists and philosophers were heralding the death of the author as a twentieth-century event analogous to the death of God, Burke argued that anti-authorial discourses were contradictory and self-defeating.
Burke’s first novel, Deadwater, a Cardiff-set work of literary noir, was widely praised upon publication for its evocation of a docklands’ community in terminal decline.
As Brian Vickers said: ‘The whole concept of the death of the author has been finally put to rest by Seán Burke.’[4]