adaptation studies

1. Adaptation Studies
Seminar-1
Dr Nadia Anwar

2. • Adaptation, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, has a
plurality of meanings and applications, most of which allude to the
process of changing to suit an alternative purpose, function, or
environment; the alteration of one thing to suit another.
(https://lucian.uchicago.edu)
• In a media context, adaptation is defined as:
An altered or amended version of a text, musical composition, etc.,
(now esp.) one adapted for filming, broadcasting, or production on the
stage from a novel or similar literary source.
(Oxford English Dictionary, “adaptation”)

3. “A process of change or modification by which an organism or species
becomes better suited to its environment or ecological niche, or a part
of an organism to its biological function, either through phenotypic
[observable characteristics of an individual] change in an individual or
(esp.) through an evolutionary process effecting change through
successive generations”. (Oxford)
A text can not only survive the shift from one form to another, but it
can also thrive in ways not previously possible in the original form
(Hutcheon 2006).

4. Consider Star Trek, [A media franchise is a collection of related media
in which several derivative works have been produced from an original
creative work] which began as a failing television program, but survived
extinction through adaptation into other media such as animated
television, comic books, novels, and feature films, before returning to
television and commencing the cycle again. Since 1966, Star Trek has
leapt back and forth from medium to medium, capitalizing on new
platforms and technology, reinventing itself again and again for new
audiences. (https://lucian.uchicago.edu)

5. • We cannot understand adaptation if we only consider the film and
novel – film, television, radio, electronic media, theme parks,
historical enactments, virtual reality experiments.
• The entertainment industry has embarked into what Thomas Leitch
refers to as an era of post-literary adaptation, in which non-literary
and sometimes non-narrative sources are adapted into storylines for
feature films and other forms of media.

6. • Unidirectional movement of literature to film is also a thing of the
past.
• Often the adaptation is considered as subsidiary and minor as
compared with the original.
• Whether it is intertextuality or the de-hierarchizing impulse to
challenge the negative evaluation of things, as stated by Hutchison,
adaptations clearly show a preference.

7. Most of the comparative methods of analysis are driven directly by the
fidelity to the text.
Versions exist laterally and not necessarily vertically. We can give
priority to any text first, it could be the original or the adapted. E.g.,
Moulin Rouge (2001, Baz Luhrmann).
Not just repetition with variation but also expansion and extension.
Bluestone’s theory posits that a filmmaker is an independent artist.
“not a translator for an established author, but a new author in his own
right”.

8. Heterocosm
A separate or alternative world.

9. For theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, the term adaptation has a multi-
layered application, referring simultaneously to
(a) the entity or product which is the result of transposing a particular
source,
(b) the process through which the entity or product was created
(including reinterpretation and re-creation of the source), and
(c) the process of reception, through which “we experience
adaptations as palimpsests through our memory of other works
that resonate through repetition and variation”, or in other words,
the ways in which we associate the entity or product as both similar
to and a departure from the original.

10. Critique
• Leo Tolstoy considered film “a direct attack on the methods of literary
art” (Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of
Adaptation”, p. 4).
• Virginia Woolf felt that cinema and literary adaptations in particular,
were responsible for the moral decline and vulgarization of modern
society, invoking the biological in her description of cinema as a
“parasite” and literature as its “prey” (Cartmell & Whelehan, Screen
Adaptation: Impure Cinema, p. 41) .

11. Robert Stam considers the following aspects as the cause of superiority
of literature over screen.
• class prejudice, iconophobia (suspicion of the visual), logophilia (a
belief in the primacy of the written word), and anti-corporeality
(distaste for the ways in which the medium of cinema engages with
the body of the spectator). (Literature and Film, 5-7)
• “The intuitive sense of adaptation’s inferiority derives [...] from a
constellation of substratal prejudices. First, it derives from the a priori
valorization of historical anteriority and seniority: the assumption that
older arts are necessarily better arts” (Stam and Raengo’s Literature
and Film: a guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation, p.4)

12. • “Critics could not forgive what was seen as the major
fault of adaptations: the impoverishment of the
book’s content due to necessary omissions in the plot
and the inability of the filmmakers to read out and
represent the deeper meanings of the text”.
(MAŁGORZATA MARCINIAK, THE APPEAL OF LITERATURE-TO-FILM ADAPTATIONS).

13. • “Another point of criticism concerned the perception
problems related to the visuality of the filmic medium.
It was an obvious fact that each act of visualization
narrowed down the open-ended characters, objects
or landscapes, created by the book and reconstructed
in the reader´s imagination, to concrete and definite
images.

14. • The verbally transmitted characteristics of the heroes, places
and the spatial relations between them, open to various
decoding possibilities in the process of imagining, were in
the grip of flattening pictures. Visualization was therefore
regarded as destroying many of the subtleties with which the
printed word could shape the internal world of a literary
work only in the interaction with the reader’s response”.
(MAŁGORZATA MARCINIAK, THE APPEAL OF LITERATURE-TO-
FILM ADAPTATIONS)

15. • Literature, like other arts, suggested a vast area of communicative
possibilities through which it could speak to the audience. According
to the theories of an open work of art and to some conclusions of the
reader-response criticism, meanings could be seen as events that
took place in the reader’s time and imagination. It was therefore
necessary to place the emphasis differently, not on the source, but on
the way its meanings were reconstructed in the process of reception.
Filmmakers had to be seen as readers with their own rights, and each
adaptation – as a result of individual reading processes.

16. Move from Fidelity to Intertextuality
Adaptations are “an endless process of recycling, transformation, and
transmutation, with no clear point of origin” (Robert Stam: Film Theory.
An Introduction, Oxford 2002, pp. 209-210).

17. Masochistic Tendencies
• Observing the “masochistic” tendencies in her Theory of Adaptation,
Linda Hutcheon wants to find out “why anyone would agree to adapt
a work, knowing their efforts would likely be scorned as secondary
and inferior to the adapted text or to the audience’s own imagined
versions”, in other words: “What motivates adapters, knowing that
their efforts will be compared to competing imagined versions in
people’s heads and inevitably be found wanting?” On the other hand
she tries to explain what persuades the readers into going to the
cinema or buying a DVD and watching an adaptation although they do
not want to see their favourite book changed.

18. Important for presentations!
We are interested in the way the authors of the film respond to the
significant parts of the literary work,
• how they transform the relations between the characters, structures
and objects,
• how they mold the characters,
• how they add richness to their portrait,
• how they reconstruct the latent subtexts and
• how they shape visually and aurally all that lies beneath the surface of
the verbally articulated work.

19. A transmedia model - concentrating less on what has been lost by a
text during the process of adaptation, and more on what the text has
gained by taking on a new form or variation. (Cartmell & Whelehan,
Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, p. 13; Murray, The Adaptation
Industry, p. 41)
Theories of Intertextuality have also become a central element of
adaptation theory, as the user compares the adapted text with not only
the original, but other adaptations and similar texts in an ongoing
dialogical process.

20. Factors to be Considered
• the nature of the source text
• the reason for adapting the text
• medium
• Market value
• culture into which it is adapted

21. What to check?
• Casting
• Mood
• Fidelity
• For Hutcheon, story and the discourse are the most important aspect
in the process of adaptation. The story includes the content behind
the narrative, comprising the chain of events, the characters and the
setting, whereas the discourse is the means by which the content is
communicated.

22. Adaptation Process
• “There appear to be fundamental differences between
the two media, and critics such as George Bluestone
discuss issues of difference in audience perception of
cinematic and literary forms, stemming from the
differences in their raw materials.

23. • In his Novels into Film, he describes the camera’s
effect on our way of seeing, the centrality of editing
and its effect on the narrative form: “The film, then,
making its appeal to the perceiving senses, is free to
work with endless variations of physical reality...
Where the moving picture cones to us directly
through perception, language must be filtered
through the screen of conceptual apprehension.” (20).

24. George Bluestone also discusses the two media’s differing ability to
handle time and space. He defines language as a medium consisting of
“three characteristics of time – transience, sequence and
irreversibility” (49), but in film “the camera is always the narrator, we
need concern ourselves only with the chronological duration of the
viewing and the time - span of narrative events” (49). It is precisely due
to the difference between the two, the gap between the forms that
adaptation is rendered into a far more creative and constructive
process than simple translation.

25. Non-sanctioned adaptation
Some theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, consider fan fiction, parodies,
and other “unofficial” texts to be outside the realm of adaptation
theory.

26. • Repetition without replication
• One interesting aspect, which makes adaptations appealing to the
public is repetition; the fact that people recognize and remember
parts of the text offers individuals both the comfort of a ritual and a
sense of surprise (Hutcheon 4).

27. Harold Bloom’s theory of anxiety of influence
• Bloom refers to a certain fear the author feels that he is not his own
creator and that the works of his predecessors assume essential
priority over his own writing. Bloom's well - known theory of the
anxiety of influence argues that writers suffer from an Oedipal fear
and jealousy for their perceived literary "fore-fathers". As such, the
unpublished writer puts himself under a great deal of pressure to
break free from his most immediate, direct influences, to form his
own voice, even to "kill" the threatening and over-bearing "father" of
his particular literary experience and inspirations. ( Maria ŞTIRBEŢIU)

28. Intertextuality
• According to Kristeva (1967) literary texts are not isolated
phenomena, but instead they are made up of a mosaic of preceding
elements – ‘mosaic of quotations’; “a permutation of texts” (Kristeva
1980 [1968]: 36).
• “Mosaics, weavings, palimpsests, networks, or refractions, among
others, have emerged at different points in the forty-year history of
the concept in a sustained effort to provide a visual characterisation
of the inescapably relational nature of texts” (“Pictures Worth a
Thousand Words: Metaphorical Images of Textual Interdependence”,
Carmen Lara-Rallo, p. 91) .

29. • “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations: any text is the
absorption and transformation of another. The notion of
intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language
is read as at least double” (Kristeva 1980 [1967]: 66).
• Each expression is pervaded by the traces of earlier uses, the text is
not a finished or closed product, but a plural productivity in which
multiple voices—textual, socio-historical and ideological—coexist and
communicate.
• Second-order memory - Barthes
• Literature in the second degree - Genette

30. “Mosaics […] like all communicative processes, are asymmetrical. Those
who look at a mosaic attentively spot its “andamento”, the expressive,
technical term for how it moves, its “gait”, traditionally categorized as
“vermiculatum”, “masivum” and so on. Those categories generalize
recurrences discerned in the body-language of many mosaics, but any
such category needs to be returned with interest to the particular
settings whence it arose” (“Dante, Primo Levi and the Intertextualists”,
2008, Eric Griffiths, pp. 4-5)

31. Barthes’ essays, beginning with “The Death of the Author”: “The text is
a tissue of quotations [. . .]. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is
to be disentangled, [. . .]; the structure can be followed, “run” (like the
thread of a stocking)” (Barthes 1988 [1968]: 170-71).

32. Valentine Cunningham’s contention designs a rich tapestry of the most
salient images of the text as a tissue:
• “Intertextuality: a textuality, a tissu, a tapestry, a weave, a
combination of warp and woof, a woven thing, not simply of itself,
isolated, alone, but inter-, between. [. . .] Between sundry filaments
new and old, threads old and new [. . .] joined up, joining, connected,
meeting. Filiations, affiliations. A new weaving, somehow a new
weaving, entangled in the skeins of a precedent one. A knitting
together of old a new strands, a complex transitivity, a braiding, a
sewing and suturing across time and space”. (Cunningham 102)

33. Refraction
Deflection
Medium to medium
Varying Density
“…a text works as a mirror of its intertext, and each sheds light on the
other, [. . .] obliterat[ing] any hierarchical or evaluative distinction
between two related texts” (Gutleben and Onega 9).

34. Deconstruction
• Jacques Derrida and his Deconstruction studies, especially the
interest in deconstructing metaphysical opposition.
• Derrida’s opinion was that each existing opposition implies that one
term is stronger or rules over the other; whether the supremacy is
chronological or socially constructed it must be deconstructed.
Deconstruction thus dismantles the hierarchy between the original
and the copy. In a Derridean perspective, the prestige of the original
is not considered the opposite of the copy; on the contrary, the
importance of the original is actually created by the copies, without
which the idea of originality would not even exist.

35. Strategies for Short Story adaptation
1. Concentration
2. Interweaving
3. Point – of – departure
4. Combination of all