The Screenplay as Postmodern Literary Exemplar: Authorial Distraction, Disappearance, Dissolution

Abstract

The article focuses on the how of writing for the screen, examining it as a text-making practice that might help us, by example, to learn new ways of writing that make meaning through polyphony, juxtaposition, dialogical interaction, and the dissolution of the author function. As multiple writers disappear into the screenplays they write, albeit unknowingly and without community, they are doing more than manufacturing homogeneous clones, more than merely participating in a reified ritual of rote iteration in service to Theodor Adorno’s relentlessly commodifying culture industry. They are making a newly engaging literary thing, something epistemologically diverse, unanchored, free flowing, floating, and authorless—an exemplar of how to make what Barthes calls “writerly texts” in the contemporary moment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.