Return of the author

so in the effort to avoid a pointless and scattered presentation/discussion on wednesday, I'm trying to work through "authorship and film" with coherence in mind... and the only thing i know for sure so far is that the author is definitely back from the dead in a big way. All the essays (so far) seem to be asserting auterism (or something very much like it). All the readings of films (especially those about a body of work) use the author and his relationship to the text to create meaning. Though they all recognize postmodernist critiques of authorship (getting quite sick of references to Barthes and Foucault and the same quoted passages), none of the essayists consider the author to be dead - all the films are deeply contextualized in relation to the author.

I guess what i'm coming to realized is that there are flaws and holes in any type of analysis - discounting the author, idealizing the author, using the author as the ultimate source of meaning. They are all wrong.. or all right. On another note, I found Janet Staiger's introduction dull, but really really helpful and informative in that is distilled the different treatments of authorship common in film studies. And I think I agree with her theory of authorship as a technique of the self. All in all, pretty interesting book, though repetitive.