Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and Adaptation

Foucault will be used in this essay to explain and evaluate key claims relating to the adapting of literary authors' works, the self-fashioning of the auteur movement in film criticism, and the status of authors in adaptation. It will be the contention of this essay that the question of authorship in adaptation should be understood in terms of what Foucault calls "founders of discursivity"—a problematic, but ultimately useful conception of the author and authorship. This will be done by placing Foucault‘s discourse-based theses in dialogue with the textual approaches of poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes, and with the history of film‘s own theories of authorship that arose during the French auteur movement.