John Caughie was born and educated in Scotland, and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1966 with a degree in English. He is now Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the John Logie Baird Centre for Research in Film and Television.

Part 1 Auteurism; Chapter 1 Introduction; Part A Auteurism in theory; Chapter 2 M. H. Abrams: `Literature as a revelation of personality¿ (extract); Chapter 3 Edward Buscombe: `Ideas of authorship¿; Part B The theory in practice; Chapter 4 Cahiers du Cinéma; Chapter 5 Movie; Chapter 6 Andrew Sarris; Part C Dossier on John Ford; Chapter 7 Louis Marcorelles: `Ford of the movies¿; Chapter 8 Lindsay Anderson: `The Searchers¿; Chapter 9 Andrew Sarris: `The Searchers¿; Chapter 10 Robin Wood: `Shall we gather at the river?; the late films of John Ford¿; Chapter 11 Peter Wollen (Lee Russell): `John Ford¿; Chapter 12 Jean-Louis Comolli: `Signposts on the trail¿; Chapter 13 Jean Narboni: `Casting out the eights: John Ford¿s Seven Women¿; Part 2 Auteur - structuralism; Chapter 14 Introduction; Chapter 15 Claude Lévi-Strauss: `The structural study of myth¿ (extract); Chapter 16 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: Visconti(extract); Chapter 17 Peter Wollen: `The auteur theory¿ (extract); Chapter 18 Charles Eckert: `The English cine-structuralists¿; Chapter 19 Brain Henderson: `Critique of cine-structuralism¿ (Part I); Chapter 20 Jean-Pierre Oudart: `Conclusion to Cahiers du Cinéma editors¿ ¿John Ford¿s Young Mr Lincoln¿¿ (extract); Chapter 21 Pierre Macherey: `Literary analysis: the tomb of structures¿ (extract); Part 3 Fiction of the author/author of the fiction; Chapter 22 Introduction; Chapter 23 Roland Barthes: `The death of the author¿; Chapter 24 Stephen Heath: `Comment on, ¿The idea of authorship¿¿; Chapter 25 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: `Six authors in pursuit of The Searchers¿ (extract); Chapter 26 Christian Metz: `History/discourse: a note on two voyeurisms¿; Chapter 27 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: `A note on ¿history/discourse¿¿; Chapter 28 Sandy Flitterman: `Woman, desire, and the look: feminism and the enunciative apparatus in cinemä; Chapter 29 Nick Browne: `The rhetoric of the specular text with reference to Stagecoach¿; Chapter 30 Jean-Pierre Oudart: `The absent held of the Author¿; Chapter 31 Pam Cook: `The point of self-expression in avant-garde film¿; Chapter 32 Michel Foucault: `What is an author?¿ (extract);