examines literary texts through the name of the author. In Signsponge, Derrida proposes a

way out of the Romantic form of literary criticism by demonstrating how unstable the

name, the proper noun, can be. The signature experiment involves inverting the name into

a common noun. By doing so, Derrida argues, you "lose the identity, the title of

ownership over the text: you let it become a monument or part of the text, as a thing or a

common noun" (56). The loss of identity also results in a loss of a set of values or

characteristics that is taken for granted by the auteurist critic. In the case of Welles, what

is lost is the assumed "Wellesian" signature.

 But what is gained from that loss is the multiplicity of meanings generated by the

common noun, which the signateurist then employs for an alternative investigation of the

text. "While auteurism centripetally (and misleadingly) gathers filmmaking's disparate

work into one proper noun ('Hitchcock,' 'Capra')," Robert B. Ray suggests, "a book like

Singsponge works centrifugally, amending structuralism's 'death of the author' by

perversely using the author's name to scatter his effects" (Andy Hardy 182). Rather than

an individual who stands outside the text and confers meaning on it, which is the auteurist

approach, the name of the author now becomes an integral part of the text. As Robert

Scholes, Nancy Comley, and Gregory Ulmer have argued, the signateurist approach

enables "the proper name [to] move[] from designating a particular individual to

becoming] the key to a general theory of how texts are constructed" (257). This kind of

move, they add, "reminds us of an ancient belief in the similarity or correspondence

between the world outside and the interior life or a person, between the macro and micro

worlds" (240). Thus, using names as clues, the signateurist critic engages in an

interpenetration of interiority and exteriority that the detective himself first introduced.