Adaptation studies : new approaches / edited by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Albrecht-Crane, Christa, 1967-

Cutchins, Dennis R. (Dennis Ray), 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Film adaptations--History and criticism.

Film adaptations.

Motion pictures and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This collection of essays offers a sustained, theoretically rigorous rethinking of various issues at work in film and other media adaptations. The essays in the volume as a whole explore the reciprocal, intertextual quality of adaptations that permeate the contemporary media experience from books, to films, to music, to graphic novels. The central argument in this book is that texts in various media always borrow, rework, and adapt each other in complex ways; in addition, the authors in this volume explore the specific forces (social, economic, historical, and authorial) that are at work in particular texts and intertexts. Together, the fourteen essays emphasize that adaptations, in the intersections they create across different media, inhabit a sort of cross-fertilization that is both artistically productive and affirmative of difference. The volume takes as its starting point the assumption that adapters cannot simply transpose or transfer one particular text from one medium to another. They must interpret, re-work, and re-imagine the precursor text in order to choose the various meanings and sensations they find most compelling (or most cost-effective); then, they create scenes, characters, plot elements, etc., that match their interpretation. These very relationships are the subject matter this collection seeks to explore. Poststructural theory is an ideal place to begin a rigorous and theoretically sound investigation of adaptation. As adaptation studies adopts a poststructuralist lens and defines this richer notion of intertextuality, some of its key assumptions will change. Adaptation scholars will recognize that all film adaptations are intertextual by definition, mutlivocal by necessity, and adaptive by their nature. This book brings together innovative, original work from fourteen scholars in the fields of adaptation studies, media studies, and critical theory. It includes essays of theoretical concern in adaptation studies as well as essays that engage with specific single and multi-source adaptations (among them, film adaptations of Jane Austen and James Joyce s fiction, Ang Lee s Brokeback Mountain, David Lynch s Lost Highway, and George Romero s Night of the Living Dead). The volume is divided into three interrelated sections: Fidelity, Ethics, and Intertextuality; Literature, Film Adaptations, and Beyond; and Adaptation as Departure. Overall, it promises to help move the study of adaptation from the fringe of critical studies to the more central role it can and should fulfill in the complex contemporary media landscape."

Contents:

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: New Beginnings for Adaptation Studies

Fidelity, Ethics, and Intertextuality

Being Adaptation: The Resistance to Theory

Turning Japanese: Translation, Adaptation, and the Ethics of Trans-National Exchange

The Ethics of Infidelity

"We're off to See the Wizard" (Again): Oz Adaptations and the Matter of Fidelity

Literature, Film Adaptations, and Beyond

Visualizing Metaphors in Brokeback Mountain

Jane Austen and the Chick Flick in the Twenty-first Century

Converting the Controversial: Regulation as "'source Text"" in Adaptation

Sausage Smoke Leading to Mulligan's Breakfast: Film Adaptation and James Joyce's Ulysses

Shane and Man on Fire: George Stevens's Enduring Legacy of Spirituality and Violence

Adaptation as Departure

Talking Pictures: Language and Emotion in Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner

Quiet, Music at Work: The Soundtrack and Adaptation

Lost Highway as Fugue: Adaptation of Musicality as Film

Assemblage Filmmaking: Approaching the Multi-Source Adaptation and Reexamining George Romero's Night of the Living Dead "Valere Quantum Valere Potest": Adaptation in Early American Cinema

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8386-4245-4