With the advent of the new millennium, as Syria was grappling with manifold social and political changes, its cultural scene went through significant transformations. Over the following decade, new literary discourses emerged that both reflected and contributed to the general atmosphere that engendered the 2011 uprising (Abbas, 2009; Weiss, 2013; McManus, 2013). My paper argues that these discourses embody an epistemological break with the dominant intellectual frameworks that had hitherto informed the literary field in Syria. They represent a new critical sensibility that interrogates the totalizing models of sovereign paternalism that a previous generation of intellectuals had produced and the genealogy they had constructed for Arab modernity. I trace the literary history of this disjunction through the representation of the figure and literary persona of Mihyār in three works by Syrian authors. The paper begins with Mihyār’s first appearance in Adonis’s 1961 poetry collection Aghānī mihyār al-dimashqī (The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus), which established this literary persona as a representative of the ḥadāthī (modernist) intellectual’s vision of future progress. It then turns to Mihyār’s reappearance as the protagonist in Ḥaydar Ḥaydar’s Walīmah li-ʾaʿshāb al-baḥr (Banquet for Seaweed), a 1983 novel that traces the journey of the intellectual under expanding authoritarian regimes. I argue that although Walīmah depicts the crumbling of Mihyār’s dreams under a series of defeats, it continues to subscribe to Adonis’s vision of the hero intellectual as a force of change, and of progress as a rupture with the past. I conclude with the feminist rewriting of Mihyār, and the intellectual he represents, in Brovā (First Draft), a 2011 novel by Rozā Yāsīn Ḥasan, one of the prominent women novelists of the 2000s. No longer a protagonist, but rather one thread in a cluster of stories, Mihyār and his legacy come under a sharp and critical spotlight in Ḥasan’s novel. Through innovative literary techniques, including metafiction and multiperspectivity, Brovā interrogates the notion of authorship as well as the legitimacy of the authority it metonymically represents. The novel, I argue, announces the metaphorical death of the savior, prophet-like intellectual and a concurrent rejection of the worldviews he held, enabling the emergence of multiple, humanized and individualized intellectuals whose realities are, like the writing of fiction, continuously in the making.