The Routledge Companion to Adaptation

Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voigts, Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voigts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317426554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Routledge Companion to Adaptation offers a broad range of scholarship from this growing, interdisciplinary field. With a basis in source-oriented studies, such as novel-to-stage and stage-to-film adaptations, this volume also seeks to highlight the new and innovative aspects of adaptation studies, ranging from theatre and dance to radio, television and new media. It is divided into five sections:

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• Mapping, which presents a variety of perspectives on the scope and development of adaptation studies;

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• Historiography, which investigates the ways in which adaptation engages with – and disrupts – history;

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• Identity, which considers texts and practices in adaptation as sites of multiple and fluid identity formations;

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• Reception, which examines the role played by an audience, considering the unpredictable relationships between adaptations and those who experience them;

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• Technology, which focuses on the effects of ongoing technological advances and shifts on specific adaptations, and on the wider field of adaptation.

An emphasis on adaptation-as-practice establishes methods of investigation that move beyond a purely comparative case study model. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation celebrates the complexity and diversity of adaptation studies, mapping the field across genres and disciplines.

PART I

Mapping the field

Katja Krebs

Maps are often an abstraction of the physical world – a symbolic depiction of a space or idea that allows one to understand and navigate an unfamiliar topography or complex topology. But while most conventional charts, plans and diagrams claim to offer an accurate, even objective picture of the world, each one is bound by the specific agendas of its creators and users.

Hans Ulbrich Obrist 2014: 11

This opening section of the Routledge Companion to Adaptation offers four different cartographies of adaptation studies: “cartographies can be altered endlessly to reflect different priorities, hierarchies, experiences, points of view and destinations” (Obrist 2014: 11). We encounter not only four different points of views but also priorities, experiences and destinations.

Sarah Cardwell draws the first of the four maps in “Pause, rewind, replay: adaptation, intertexuality and (re)defining adaptation studies”. Being concerned with the development of adaptation studies as quintessentially unmappable in its current form, as it has changed from “an under-acknowledged, narrowly focused field of study into an all-embracing perspective which eagerly consumes all intertexts in its path”, Cardwell tries to establish much-needed focus in order to halt adaptation studies’ “sowing the seeds of its own destruction”. Her suggestion to hit replay and engage with the development of a “more precise vocabulary from which new conceptual insights and debate can evolve” is put into the context of an otherwise unmappable field where “the study of adaptation mutates into the study of intertextuality” and becomes “logically unlimited”. In other words, adaptation studies needs to (re)define itself, decide what to include in an otherwise unnavigable sea of texts.

Kamilla Elliott’s “The theory of BADaptation” points the compass in a different direction whereby this chapter uses the analysis of existing maps of the field of adaptation studies in order to uncover their specific agendas and perspectives. Subsequently, Elliott is then able to propose that we need to “study adaptations to discover ways in which theorization is lacking, allowing adaptations to challenge and adapt even our most cherished theoretical beliefs”. In other words, the object of the map has to be allowed to take an active role in its direction. Rather than developing “new theory or more theories” Elliott calls for “a major rethinking of the dysfunctional and oppositional relationship between adaptation and theorization”.

In “Adaptation and the concept of the original”, Rainer Emig conceptualises one of the ­pivotal concerns of adaptation studies, i.e. the relationship between adaptation and the original. Taking fidelity criticism as the start of his discussion, Emig demonstrates the inherent contradiction in notions of fidelity which, at specific moments in history, ranged from “precise copying of models” to “conformity to an underlying theological idea” and are inextricably linked to the concept of “the authenticating creator (usually male)” who “supposedly infused an original work with his ideas and skills”. However, rather than offering us a neat solution to the inherent contradictions of notions of the original and authorship, Emig’s discussion of fidelity criticism as one of the cornerstones of adaptation studies takes us on a journey from the Romantic ideals of the creative genius via Structuralism, Formalism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction, to a position which, he argues, is in itself not necessarily any less problematic.

Patrick Cattrysse takes us in a very different direction in his discussion of “An evolutionary view of cultural adaptation: Some considerations”. Using adaptation studies’ close cousin Translation Studies as his starting point, Cattrysse categorises adaptations as comprising both ‘ipsative’ and ‘additive’ processes, whereas translation studies scholars have abandoned the ipsative translation in favour of the additive one. While Cattrysse’s starting point may be markedly different, one of his main concerns is also fidelity, yet he shifts the focus from fidelity – or, more broadly, the relationship between source and adaptation – to the relationship “between the adaptation and its new target context”. His conclusion is a call to a “descriptive–explanatory approach”, very much akin to the approach exemplified by Descriptive Translation Studies, which is in a position to disregard “the (inter)-personal taste of the analyst”.

Each of these four chapters is as distinct from one another as if they were points on a compass, taking position at different ends of the spectrum. However, without a North there would be no South, and without an East there would be no West. As such, what each chapter in this mapping section does do is offer a redrawing of established territories in order to “challenge the authority with which maps depict the ‘truth’ and question the very grounds on which” (Obrist 2014: 11) adaptation studies exists.

Works cited

Obrist, Hans Ulbrich (ed.) (2014), Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies, London: Thames and Hudson.

1

Pause, rewind, replay

Adaptation, intertextuality and (re)defining adaptation studies

Sarah Cardwell

‘Adaptation studies’ today is a massively expanded and proliferating field. From medium-specific versus comparative approaches, to intertextuality and metatextuality, onwards to intermediality and transmediality, twenty-first-century adaptation studies has broadened its original scope from literary/theatrical adaptations on screen to innumerable permutations and degrees of adaptation and related practices. Eclectic interpretations of individual adaptations have burgeoned. Scholars from far beyond the traditional enclaves of literature or film departments contribute to the subject’s growth.

Rejecting the prejudices and hierarchies of pre-1980s adaptation studies, embracing and asserting pluralism, today’s scholars positively celebrate adaptation as a diverse cultural practice. Our notion of adaptation has expanded ostensibly in response to contemporary, real-world creative developments, exhibiting openness to many forms of ‘adaptiveness’, but the field’s current relativistic pluralism also conforms to dominant scholarly, theoretical trends. The two seem fruitfully to coincide and drive adaptation studies inevitably into the future, rejecting older conceptions of adaptation (based mostly on literature-screen examples) “in favour of an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling cultural process: flagrantly transgressing cultural and media hierarchies, wilfully cross-cultural, and more weblike than straightforwardly linear in its creative dynamic” (Murray 2012: 2).

However, this happy concord conceals a gap at the heart of adaptation studies. Today’s apparent eclecticism and openness constitute a breadth that belies a lack of depth. There are many oversights in this new age of adaptation studies: topics that lie neglected, questions that remain buried and unanswered, and alternative approaches not yet adopted. These are the unforeseen drawbacks of the particular nature of expansion the field has undergone since the late 1990s.

It is crucial to recognise that fundamentally underpinning the recent transformation of adaptation studies is a radically amended notion of what (an) adaptation is, and a greater recognition of its connectedness with other cultural practices, such as borrowing, remaking, translating and so on (manifested, for instance, as we shall see later, in collections edited by Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo [2005], Mireia Aragay [2005] and Ulrike H. Mienhoff and Jonathan Smith [2000]). But the concept of adaptation per se has necessarily been diluted as it expands to form a catch-all category for these permutations. The relationship and differences between adaptation and related forms of textual interconnectedness are exceedingly complex, and the focused conceptual work required to elaborate them is currently thin on the ground.

Moreover, and correspondingly, the vocabulary adaptation scholars once relied upon appears to be in crisis, its functional and explanatory powers increasingly undermined. Thoughtful challenges to key concepts which once served to define and delimit adaptation (e.g. original/source/ur-text, interpretation/translation) too often lead to the words being summarily cast aside; alternative, looser and more fashionable terms (e.g. meta- and inter-textuality, and inter- and trans-mediality) proliferate; potentially valuable distinctions between adaptation and related practices become blurred; and adaptation becomes harder and harder to pin down. Indeed, adaptation studies has mutated from an under-acknowledged, narrowly focused field of study into an all-embracing perspective which eagerly consumes all intertexts in its path – and which, by doing so, may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Now is the moment to pause, rewind a little and reflect upon the fascinating course of adaptation studies, and its present trajectory and purposes, with the hope of ensuring its future.

Golf studies knows its focus: golf, not tennis. An enterprising scholar of the subject might provocatively conceive a tennis match as golf, but such enterprises would not challenge the core remit of the field. Adaptation studies is different, for every adaptation is always something else too: a film, a TV programme, a book, a play. Therefore, historically, the purpose of adaptation studies was to study an adaptation as an adaptation. This worked well. It meant that (for example) a film could be studied as a film, from a range of film studies’ perspectives, or as an adaptation, with similarly varied emphases. To approach the film as an adaptation meant prioritising its connections with its source text; to examine it as a film did not. There was something distinctive about an adaptation studies approach: it acknowledged the curious “equivocatory use of the word adaptation, a result of the homonymic verbal conflation of (the process of) adaptation and (the end product) adaptation” (Cardwell 2002: 11). This dual definition of adaptation shaped our field, inspiring and guiding those who would seek out and examine its instances, as well as delimiting their focus.

Adaptation studies today, in contrast, could be characterised as the study not only of adaptations-as-adaptations but also of a wide range of texts-as-adaptations. Scholars pull more and more creative works into the field, some of which are not adaptations – or even texts – in any established sense; a recent book on adaptation includes “remakes, video games, biopics, fan fiction and celebrity culture” (Carroll 2009: cover), for example. This can and does generate exciting new interpretations of individual works and specific practices, but it has consequences for the conceptual coherence of our discipline. The adaptation studies scholar no longer requires an adaptation, but instead needs only take the appropriate attitude to the work under scrutiny. There is an ontological fissure. The performance of adaptation studies has come unfixed from a notion of what (an) adaptation is. Adaptations are no longer logically necessary for adaptation studies. How did this happen?

Intertextuality and the transformation of adaptation studies

Adaptation studies was transformed by the inexorable rise of intertextuality. Of course, intertextuality has always been attended to, whether under that label or not, as the study of textual influence and referentiality, for the practice is ubiquitous and inevitable in art. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the striking, special links between intertextuality and adaptation were brought to centre stage.

In 1996, in his important monograph on comparative studies of adaptation, Brian McFarlane argued that “[m]odern critical notions of intertextuality represent a more sophisticated approach [than fidelity criticism], in relation to adaptation” (1996: 10); he reiterated that the source text is only one of an adaptation’s intertexts, and not always the most salient. In 2002, Sarah Cardwell argued even more forcefully for the importance of intertextual criticism in her study of the sub-genre of television classic-novel adaptations, emphasising that an adaptation’s “intertextual references […] may prove to be even more relevant to [its] meanings and effects than its novelistic sourc...