The Drama of the Diegetic Author

Abstract

This chapter analyses those films which narrativise the lives of canonical authors. Such films are not adaptations in the strict sense, but they feature the same kind of anamorphic processes outlined in the preceding chapters, and narrativise many of the themes underlying adaptation studies’ competing conceptions of authorship: in these films, the author’s status as either dead or concealed is most clearly explored. These films foreground the artifice of narratives associated with the authors but then include numerous examples of those narratives occurring ‘spontaneously’ in the diegetic authors’ lives. This is the anamorphic process writ large—a signifier of artifice quickly displaced with an obfuscation of that artifice. These films also facilitate heightened examples of dialogic academic criticism. They therefore make a good final study which sums up how competing academic approaches to adaptation can analyse certain important facets of their subject matter, but are incapable of exploring other ideological elements.