Graduate Studies

 

First Advisor

Marco Abel

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Committee Members

Guy Reynolds, Ingrid Robyn, James Brunton

Department

English

Date of this Version

8-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Citation

A dissertation presented to the Graduate College of the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Major: English

Under the supervision of Professor Marco Abel

Lincoln, Nebraska, August 2025

Comments

Copyright 2025, Tom Knoblauch. Used by permission

Abstract

In its common contemporary use, auteurism professes simplicity (a filmmaker’s authorship is as singular as a novelist’s), nobility (to use this framework is to respect the process and integrity of artistic genius), and flexibility (anyone with a singular voice can become an auteur). Each strand is much more complicated in ways that correspond to artistic traditions, economic shifts, and audience identification. This dissertation contextualizes the reconstruction of auteurism in the 1990s in United States cinema within the market demands of neoliberalism and the inherent aesthetic baggage that still lingers from the artistic traditions of “genius” and “authenticity” as white-male coded. Through re-evaluating the limits of the auteur, I will show why auteurism, in its late-capitalist incarnation of self-commodification, has failed to transcend white-male coding, perpetuating a limited canon of selves worth exploring and celebrating as “authentic” expressions in commercial media. This limitation in its traditional framework sets the stage for a new theory of post-auteurism that seeks to escape from the white-male genius coding that has often held back diverse voices from an equal field of expression and perceived legitimacy by communities of critics, awards bodies, and the general consensus around canonization. Auteurism from its start sought to celebrate the personal, the irreplaceable and the unique—which should lend itself to a rejection of cultural homogeneity, not an embrace of it, as has often been the case. This is the re-centering that is possible in what I call the post-auteur moment, wherein a move from the identity-politics based hierarchies of the past and its related ur-sins that led to the 1990s reconstruction can be repositioned within a broader symbolic market of identity politics as they manifest in the emergent hegemony of content in the twenty-first century. This project will begin the necessary conversation of what constitutes post-auteurism and where we see it already manifesting in the existing cinematic and transmedia landscape.

Advisor: Marco Abel

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