FOR ADMISSION TO THE DOCTORATE OF COMMUNICATION (BY RESEARCH)

In ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House of Cinema’, Cholodenko argues that film is, metaphorically speaking, a haunted house: an instance of the uncanny. This raises the possibility the film script is also uncanny, from the Freudian notion of das Unheimliche, the strangely familiar and familiarly strange – and thus also a haunted house. This proposition engenders a search as self-reflexive practice for that which haunts the script – an uncanny process to explore the uncanny. The search requires drawing on Barthes, acting ‘as dead ’ with that process ’ attendant contradictions and problematics – the most likely ghost in the script being the writing self. Establishing the characteristics of the writing self involves distinguishing that figure from the author. This requires outlining the development of theories of the author from the concept of authorial will, as per the argument of Hirsch, to the abnegation of the author as a philosophical certainty. Barthes and Foucault call this abnegation the death of the author. Rather than that marking the end of a particular branch of analysis, the death of the author can be considered an opening to the writing practice. From this perspective