ABSTRACT
A number of contemporary theorists have reiterated Osip Brik and Béla Balazs's claims that the screenplay is not an autonomous literary work, not an "independent object". Echoing Balazs's remarks on the relationship between screenplay and film, Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider suggest, "a screenplay is 'absorbed' into one film only", that it is "entirely 'burnt up' in the production process". Like the ingredient hypothesis, the incompleteness hypothesis makes a claim about the ontology of the screenplay that may or may not be harnessed in support of an argument against the screenplay as literature. Roughly, the thought is that rather than endorsing a particular definition of literature that will include screenplays, the proponent of the screenplay as literature can proceed by showing that on any number of a variety of extant definitions at least some screenplays will count as literature. Of the various extant definitions of literature, perhaps the only one that may give screenplays trouble is an institutional definition.
