Julie Sanders - What is Adaptation?

Introduction

• Texts feed off and create other texts
• The creation of literature is self-perpetuating
• Texts are built from both the conventions established by previous works in their eras and by the conventions of their medium.  
• The more one reads, the more parallels and intertexts they will be able to bring to a text
• It is personal - everyone sees a text in a different light and brings their own views/intertexts

• The late twentieth century has brought into question the importance of being ‘original’
• Edward Said believes recently we have been more focused on ‘rewriting’ instead of creating new, original works
• T.S. Eliot questioned why originality  was valued over repetition
• He felt that no work held any meaning alone and that new material relies on past literature (like a foundation one builds off of)
• Yet ‘rewriting’ is more than just imitation
• Rewriting is adaptation and response to a text
• Roland Barthes believed ‘any text is an intertext’ suggesting that the works of previous and surrounding cultures is always present in literature
• Julia Kristeva created the term intertexualité to describe the process by which a text is a ‘permutation of texts’
• Today we think of intertextuality as how texts encompass and respond to other texts
• The vocabulary of describing adaptations has been changing recently
• There has been a movement to increase ways in which adaptations use intertexts
• Do they borrow, steal, mimic, pay homage to,echo, etc. the original text?
• It is important to distinguish between direct quotation and acts of citation
• Quotation depends on the context in which the quotation takes place
• Citation is usually self-authenticating and/or reverential to its reference
• A good adaptive text should be able to stand alone, but the awareness of its intertext enriches a reader’s understanding
• Adaptation not only requires, but perpetuates the existence of, the text adapted
• Adaptation also transcends imitation - it adds,supplements, and expands on the original
• Adaptation is also not linear, in which the appropriation is secondary to the original
• It is tangled and a blending (“grafting”)
• Why do we even create adaptations?
• It’s fun!
• Audiences enjoy seeing a blend of old and new, similarity and difference
• Readers also may feel rewarded to be able to identify intertexts

Vocabulary and Definitions

• Hypotext - an earlier text that is imitated or transformed
• Hypertext - any text that grafts itself onto a hypotext (what is created)
• Bricolage
• In literature it is any text that assembles a range or quotations, allusions, and citations from existing works of art
• Like a literary collage
• Pastiche
• The literary practice of extended imitation of the style of a writer
• It is often used in a satirical manner but may sometimes be admiring
• Misprision - the reinterpretation of texts during the process of adoption, translation, and reworking

What is the difference between adaptations and appropriations?

• The two are different in how explicitly they reference an intertext
• Adaptations are obviously a re-reading or interpretation of a text while appropriations are more subtle
• Adaptations often involve a cultural change, an updating of the text for current audiences, or a different context
• Appropriations are less explicit, and often re-interpret a text through a political or ethical lense
• Adaptation
• Constitutes a sustained engagement with a single text (more than a simple quote or allusion)
• Linked to the idea of hybridity (things are repeated, relocated, and translated)
• There are three main categories of adaptation
• Transposition, commentary, and analogue
• Transposition - shifting the original to a new genre, culture, geography, time (as many or few shifts as wanted)
• Ex: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet changed both culture and time
• Commentary - adaptations that comment on the politics of the source text, or the new work, or both
• Ex: Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park as an adaptation of The Tempest used Sycorax as a commentary on British colonialism/ slavery
• Analogue - adaptations which stand alone/ do not require knowledge of original source
• Ex: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless  which is a variation of Jane Austen’s Emma
• Adaptations may include the following techniques
• Parallelism - following/ mimicking original text
• Amplification - adding. expanding original
• Reduction - cutting down on the original
• Proximation - bringing the text closer to the audience's frame of reference/ moving adaptation closer in time
• Appropriation
• Constitutes sustained engagement with the text, but often adopts a posture of critique (perhaps even assault)
• Appropriations do not clearly signal to source text
• Two broad categories of appropriation: embedded texts and sustained appropriations
• Embedded texts and interplay are stand-alone works and modern reworkings of their originals
• Ex: West Side Story would not exist without Romeo and Juliet,  and it highlighted issues of race conflict in New York at the time
• Sustained appropriations are those that closely mimic the original (this may be in writing style, plotline, structure, etc.)
• Interestingly, some works may be adaptations and appropriations at the same time
• Ex: Kiss Me Kate is based of The Taming of the Shrew
• There is pure adaptation in the play-within-a-play aspect (a theater troupe performs The Taming of the Shrew)
• There is also appropriation in the wider story of the theater performers
• There has been great controversy over sustained appropriation
• Is it homage or plagiarism?
• ex: Graham Swift’s Last Orders mimicked William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in plot, similar monologues, similar characters
• He was accused of plagiarism/ being unoriginal but he said that his work was an homage to As I Lay Dying
• Perhaps if he had originally stated/ openly declared this homage he would have not been criticized as harshly, but then we would have lost connections to other sources
• Last Orders also has links with T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and old English poems Wanderer and Seafarer
• We might have never seen these links if Graham had explicitly cited As I Lay Dying