Introduction
“Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives”
Abstract
The discipline of adaptation studies has come a long way from its academic inception in novel-to-film studies. Since George Bluestone’s seminal 1957 study Novels into Film, often regarded as the starting point of modern day Anglo-American adaptation studies,[1] the discipline has seen a continual widening of its methodology as well as of the material scholars are willing to regard as adaptations. Particularly since the turn of the 21st century and the increasing institutionalization of the discipline as distinct from literary or film studies, adaptation scholars have widened the scope to include a broad range of media, encompassing not only the traditional adaptations from novels and drama into film, but also novelizations of various other media, video game and comic adaptations, TV series, opera, theme parks and tie in vacations, and many more.[2] Others have included the study of media franchises as dependent on adaptation.[3] As part of this redefinition of the discipline, scholars have also widened their discussion to bring to the centre aspects that were not originally the main focus of adaptation researchers’ comparative textual analyses, including industrial structures, legal frameworks, and, most frequently and emphatically, questions of intertextuality and the cultural and ideological embeddedness of adapted texts.[4] Since the late 1990s, cultural and societal questions have occupied particularly those adaptation scholars eager to introduce larger theoretical or cultural studies questions and move away from purely formal analyses.[5] Such questions include what Linda Hutcheon, building on Jill L. Levenson’s work, calls processes of “indigenization”, i.e. an examination of the ways in which “[c]ultures that adapt stories […] reshape narratives […] according to their own tastes and preoccupation, according to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of their day”.[6]
[1] George Bluestone. Novels into Film. Berkeley 1957. Bluestone is most often cited (and misrepresented) as a starting point in a discipline that, as Kamilla Elliott has convincingly shown, suffers from (strategic) amnesia in its attempts to claim novelty for already established concepts (Kamilla Elliott. “Theorizing Adaptation/Adapting Theories.” In: Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (eds.). Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. London et al. 2013, pp. 19-45; esp. pp. 19-31). As Elliott shows, this stands in contrast to older (and significant) contributions to film and adaptation studies, including Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture, Lester Asheim’s From Book to Film, or some of Andre Bazin’s essays such as “In Defense of Mixed Cinema”. Vachel Lindsay. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York 1915. Lester Asheim. From Book to Film: A Comparative Analysis of the Content of Selected Novels and the Motion Pictures Based upon Them. Chicago 1949. André Bazin. “In Defense of Mixed Cinema.” In: John Harrington (ed.) Film and/as Literature. Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1977, pp. 13-26. Harrington’s Film and/as Literature also collects other significant early texts of adaptation theory, particularly on the relation between literature, film, and theater.
[2] E.g. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York / London 2013.
[3] Clare Parody. “Adaptation Essay Prize Winner: Franchising/Adaptation.” Adaptation 4, no. 2 (2011): 210–218.
[4] It should, once again, be noted that early critics like Bluestone or Bazin were not as oblivious to such issues as they are often portrayed.
[5] Cf. Elliott. “Theorizing Adaptation/Adapting Theories.”
[6] Linda Hutcheon. “Moving Forward: The Next Step in Adaptation Studies.“ In: Nassim Winnie Balestrini (ed.). Adaptation and American Studies: Perspectives on Research and Teaching, With an Afterword by Linda Hutcheon. Heidelberg 2011, pp. 213-17; p. 217.
