The Dead Author and the Concealed Author

The final chapter in the first half of the book examines the differences between the two approaches discussed in the previous two chapters. It begins by setting out in detail the poststructuralist approach to canonical authorship that informs the book’s analysis of adaptation. Derived from the broad poststructuralist account explored in the previous chapter, this approach is situated in Benveniste’s distinction between two enunciative registers: discours, which reveals the source of its articulation, and histoire, which conceals that source. Christian Metz uses these registers to analyse how film grammar reveals and conceals the filmmakers’ articulative status. The chapter sets out how the registers can be used to analyse how film adaptation reveals and conceals the original author’s articulative status, which I call the ‘drama of authorship’. The detailed elaboration of this process is undertaken in the second half of the book. The focus in this chapter is on setting out the theoretical groundwork for this subsequent taxonomy, and on how the approach differs from, and addresses the unseen consequences of, dialogic approaches to adaptation derived from Barthes and Bakhtin.