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Postmodern adaptation: Pastiche, intertextuality and re-functioning
Abstract
Average film-goers probably take more notice of a film’s stars than of its director. Stars or actors are, after all, visible on screen for approximately two hours whereas the director merely fronts or ends the credits. How many viewers, for example, know the directors of the Bridget Jones films (Sharon Maguire and Beeban Kidron) compared with those who know its stars, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, and Renée Zellweger? When you read a novel you hold the author’s name in your hands, touching it with your finger-tips, and what you see in reading are their words. But when a film is “based on the book, story or play by …,” then the author’s name tends also to recede along with their text, even such a one as Helen Fielding, J. R R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, or Shakespeare. The process is, we might say, a technologically-induced version of the “death of the author” theorized by Roland Barthes in the 1960s. Barthes’s intention was to demote the godlike figure of the (usually male designated) “Author” to the figure of a “scriptor” working laterally across texts, and to activate the reader, similarly, as a figure who cruised, antennae bristling, across this layered textuality, but did not pause to dig below or look behind this surface for a book’s single authorized meaning.1 Barthes’s essay, along with other theoretical essays in the same decade, by Julia Kristeva,2 for example, inaugurated the concept of intertextuality and the practice of intertextual reading. This was one of the major strategic features of poststructuralism and is a continuing touchstone in the Humanities. At the same time, we cannot fail to notice, almost fifty years after Barthes’s essay, that in the world of everyday reading, book reviews, as well as much academic criticism, the author is as strong a presence as ever.
... However, in this rich panorama of neo-Victorian gothic TV series, nothing better exemplifies the relationship between women's agency and the emergence of monstrosity as John Logan's Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky Atlantic, 2014-16), which has been the object of critical attention in terms of appropriation (Sanders 2006), intertextuality (Brooker 2007), transfiction (Pearson 2018), and metafictional uchronia (Bellavita 2020 Stoker -by merging their respective characters in order to create a new collective narrative project. While these four novels all relegated their female characters to the passive role of the protagonists' (in)significant other, in Penny Dreadful's pastiche-like syncretism, the narrative construction of female identity becomes central and is further heightened by its association with sexual deviance seen both as a curse and God-given mark of individuality. ...
The article aims to trace the transmedia narrative of gendered otherness in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful. After a brief introduction to the theoretical framework concerning the subversive constructions of neo-Victorian monstrosity, the article examines the character of Miss Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful as an example of the fortunate intersection between the concepts of abjection and female agency.
... Kristeva's argument centres around originality or lack of it in a text, adding that other previous texts influence the production of another, new text. However, beyond the concept of intertextuality, the apparent degree and types of adaptation and/or appropriation existing between texts call for more thorough observation and call for a corresponding vocabulary to describe what happens (Brooker 2007). First, Sanders defines adaptation as 'a cinematic version of canonical plays and novels', while appropriation refers to a process that 'frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain ' (2006: 23-26). ...
Against many odds, the Hausa film industry alias Kannywood has come of age. The film industry survives several pressing challenges from within and outside Nigeria, perhaps more than its counterparts anywhere else. Although there is no denying that the quality of its output has significantly improved, its survival has little or nothing to do with that. Many critics, including the Motion Pictures Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MOPPAN) leadership, call ‘bad’ films, are still being made. Romantic movies, laden with a typical and predictable pattern of the love triangle, song and dance sequences among other appropriated and plagiarized Bollywood modalities, remain the favourite of producers and arguably that of the audience. However, according to some surveys, such films lack merit in the realm of critical film discourse in Africa and beyond. This article is set out to discuss this issue through a content analysis of a recent film titled Sareena (Nuhu 2019). The movie, released in 2019, is a bloated, implausible melodrama and a direct mimicry of a famous Indian film, Kaabil (Gupta 2017).
From canonical movies to web series, this volume provides fresh insights into the myriad forms of Romeo and Juliet on screen around the world. Ranging far beyond the Anglo-American sphere, the international cast of contributors explore translations, adaptations, free re-tellings and appropriations from India, France, Italy and Japan and demonstrate the constant evolution of technologies in the production, reception and dissemination of 'Shakespeare on screen'. The volume is complemented by helpful online essays and an extended online film-bibliography which guides readers through the often overwhelming range of filmic resources now available, providing valuable resources for research and pedagogy.
Sherlock Holmes represents an archetype whose genius and eccentricity made him famous around the world and inspired countless other detectives that are based on him, thus creating a Sherlock Holmes paradigm. Moreover, he epitomizes the concepts of genius and eccentricity, which are already marked by a long cultural history, and helped to firmly establish them in popular culture. But what is it about Holmes that sets him apart from other characters and can explain the public’s enduring fascination with him?
In this study, it will be shown how numerous elements of the paradigm are still present in many contemporary television crime series, such as the two British series Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989 – 2013) and Sherlock (2010 – present) as well as the two US series Monk (2002 – 2009) and The Mentalist (2008 – 2015). I will illustrate that the crucial factors of this continuum through time, space and different media are Holmes’s genius and eccentricity in their manifold manifestations. The aim is to verify Holmes as the embodiment of the continuing ambivalence of this label: On the one hand, it offers an outlet for individuality in an age of standardisation and a promise of salvation in troubled times. On the other hand, it comes at the price of being considered an outsider by not conforming to social conventions and traditional gender roles or even of being branded as mentally ill.
At first sight, it may seem paradoxical that order and orientation are brought about by a character that is actually marked by his refusal to conform to any norms. Yet it will be shown how the genius of Holmes and his eccentricities are made more relatable to the audience by the seriality of the TV shows as they provide the platform to show both patterns and progress of their protagonists, i.e. eccentric geniuses.
In order to explore the relation between the eccentric genius and society, a televised form of detective fiction is especially useful because of the genre’s intrinsic interest in social order and disorder as well as the medium’s link to society. Bearing the sociocultural factor in mind, it will be discussed how the change of time and context affects the image we have of this type and why we still have use for it. As a result, the portrayal of these characters allows us to draw conclusions about the needs, hopes and fears of the society in which they are created.
In this study, Netflix’s original series Freud (Marvin Kren, 2020 – ), adapted from Sigmund Freud’s biography (1856-1939) was analyzed according to traditional adaptation understanding based on the loyalty to the source text. Freud is an eight-part Austrian-German series in the crime, thriller, mystery genre covering the early professional years of Freud. The story of the series is created in connection with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. In adaptation, a text can remain faithful during its conversion into a visual narrative such as a series or a film, or it can be approached through an intertextual perspective. Since Freud was faithfully adapted following psychoanalytical theory, this study preferred essentialist approaches in engaging the subject. Even though the first season of the series narrates the development period of Freud’s work, psychoanalytic theory is handled holistically in the analysis part of the study. As a result of the analysis, it was observed that although mystery and crime events were added to Freud’s biography, the hierarchy was preserved between the source text and Freud series. Hence, this study aims to contribute to the existing literature by engaging in a psychoanalytical analysis of an online series in an interdisciplinary way.
The television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is an appropriation, intertextuality and transfiction exercise of four modern myths from nineteenth-century literature –Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1891) and Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)– to which the mythological figure of the lycanthrope is added. This myth syncretism is completed by linking these characters, located in the Victorian London of the late 19th century, with different mythologies: biblical, Egyptian, American West, Native American or witch mythology. The article aims to analyse, focusing on the final season of the series, how the narrative complexity of contemporary seriality and the different materialisations of postmodern image –multiplex-image, distance-image and excessimage– become perfect tools to both narrate the identity search of the different characters and subvert and resemantise these modern myths. Their identity searches emerge from an ontology of otherness that defines postmodernity –from otherness of conscience to otherness of other people–, using the mythical figure of the monster. It allows then the subversion and resemantisation of each mythical character, generating a kind of postmodern mythology that reflects on our contemporaneity: feminist emancipation and violent revolution, patriarchy and machismo, family institution, social marginalisation, individualism and lack of commitment, classism and racism.
ABSTRACT: This paper provides a postmodern reading of Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the intertextual doubles expressed through depictions of disability, masculinity, and race. Drawing upon the scholarship of Jay Dolmage, Gordon Slethaug, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, I discuss how disability is used in these films as a prop for socio-economic issues. Unpacking the intertextual doubling of disability as ‘problem space,’ gender performance, and death metaphor illuminates how these films employ disability myths to explore issues of historical and cultural tension. The disability myths of isolation, social ill, internal flaw, ethical test, and enactment continue to actively stereotype people with disabilities and use their bodies as metaphors for violence. CITATION: Van de Kemp, Jessica. “Disability on Screen: Intertextual Doubling in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Do the Right Thing.” Interviews with a Photographer and a Filmmaker (Cinematic Codes Review 2.2). Ed. Anna Faktorovich. Brownsville, TX: Anaphora Literary Press, 2017. 90–111. Print.
The television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is an appropriation, intertextuality and transfiction exercise of four modern myths from nineteenth-century literature –Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1891) and Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)– to which the mythological figure of the lycanthrope is added. This myth syncretism is completed by linking these characters, located in the Victorian London of the late 19th century, with different mythologies: biblical, Egyptian, American West, Native American or witch mythology. The article aims to analyse, focusing on the final season of the series, how the narrative complexity of contemporary seriality and the different materialisations of postmodern image –multiplex-image, distance-image and excess- image– become perfect tools to both narrate the identity search of the different characters and subvert and resemantise these modern myths. Their identity searches emerge from an ontology of otherness that defines postmodernity –from otherness of

conscience to otherness of other people–, using the mythical figure of the monster. It allows then the subversion and resemantisation of each mythical character, generating a kind of postmodern mythology that reflects on our contemporaneity: feminist emancipation and violent revolution, patriarchy and machismo, family institution, social marginalisation, individualism and lack of commitment, classism and racism.
The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 - edited by Peter Boxall June 2019
Critics of Woody Allen’s 2015 film Irrational Man have commented on its echoing of themes treated in his previous films, most notably Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005). Others have found the film to be reminiscent of the works of Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock. This chapter explores the exact trajectories that allow us to read Allen’s Irrational Man against the backdrop of Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train as well as Hitchcock’s 1951 eponymous movie adaptation. While Allen’s film is not an adaptation of Highsmith’s novel in the narrow sense, Irrational Man reveals a subtle and intricate relationship to it.
The radically intertextual, playful and often metafictive modes of fiction for children presents film-makers with innovative opportunities, as well as posing challenges as texts cross media and genre. Literature and film for children both exist at the intersection of a number of other discourses, genres and intertexts, which they appropriate, adapt and mix, and, as a multimodal means of communication, film is a particularly hybridic medium with a unique range of resources at its disposal. Focussing on a small number of books and films that push the boundaries of audience, genre and form, namely The Princess Bride (Golding, 1973; Reiner, 1987), Stardust (Gaiman, 1998; Vaughn, 2007) and Inkheart (Funke, 2003; Softley, 2008), this chapter explores the phenomenon of genre mixing and narrative experimentation in both literary and film texts for children.
Predictions concerning the end of the nation state may have been too hasty: in-between the global and the local, the national continues to be surprisingly resilient. I believe, however, that Appadurai is in essence correct about mass mediation and migration constituting the materials for a possible post-national imaginary, coexisting with, if not necessarily replacing, forms of national belonging. It is this imaginary and its relationship to mockumentary as a form of representation that is the main concern of this chapter, in the specific case of Mexican—but yet, post-national—identity in A Day without a Mexican by Sergio Arau. Both the short (1998) and the feature film (2004) versions of this mockumentary are constructed around a simple but effective plot: the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all Latino immigrants from the state of California. This disappearance brings the economic and social life of the region to a standstill and the consequences are explored in the mockumentary. Set within the context of a growing Chicano population in the United States and the high level of migration from Mexico across the border, the stated aim of A Day is to advance a social agenda, arguing the case for immigrant labor and for the Mexican presence in the United States more generally.2 In this respect, the seriousness of a documentary would seem to have been a better fit than the excess and parody of mockumentary.
‘From Text, to Myth, to Meme: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation’ examines contamination as a form of adaptation in the Showtime/Sky television series Penny Dreadful. According to David Greetham, ‘contamination’ occurs when ‘one mode of discourse . . . leaks into or infects another, so that we experience both at the same time.’ Lee and King argue that contamination is a model of adaptation. The series is self-conscious about its status as adaptation, and uses ideas of parenthood and theatricality in order to bring attention to the adaptation’s relationship to an originary text. Challenging linear and genetic models of adaptation, Penny Dreadful transforms Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) into vehicles of cultural transmission: memes that have come to redefine the viewer’s relationship to Victorian literature and culture as a myth of modernity.
This essay examines how two of Orson Welles’s radio plays, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’, blur the
lines between radio’s commercial and artistic functions in order to deconstruct Welles’s radio celebrity and, by extension,
media celebrity in general. These two adaptations of novels for Welles’s Campbell Playhouse series (1938–40) mix fact and fiction by inserting the plays’ fictional characters into the broadcasts’ commercial segments
and also incorporating elements of the advertisements into the plays. The plays’ characters are equated to product spokespeople,
blurring the boundaries between art and commerce. As a result, media-generated celebrity personae, such as Welles’s own, are
exposed as commercially driven fictions. Both broadcasts were written by Herman Mankiewicz, Welles’s co-writer on Citizen Kane. By applying extended close readings to the rarely studied radio collaborations of Welles and Mankiewicz, this essay argues
ultimately that the plays’ scrutiny of media celebrity prefigures similar thematic concerns in Citizen Kane.
While decades of criticism have echoed Dudley Andrew’s 1980 call for an end to fidelity discourse, more recent criticism (including
by Andrew himself, in 2011) is reconsidering fidelity’s usefulness. This article posits a post-millennial resurgence in fidelity
criticism in order to make a (final?) recuperative claim for fidelity as one essential tool in the intertextual toolbox of
adaptation studies.
This essay investigates how John Fowles cooperated with director David Tringham on the film script for the short story “The Last Chapter”. It analyses both the initial writing process by comparing different versions of the unpublished short story and the way its metafictional features were turned into cinematic form. By situating this experience in Fowles's early engagement with film versions of his fiction, the essay shows that Fowles to some extent benefited from the unsuccessful adaptations of his early novels. As his metafictional technique was at the forefront of aesthetic experimentation, cinema first had to develop a formal language that worked for texts like “The Last Chapter” and Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.
This article uses Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to argue that one of the key features of adaptations is the foregrounding of the media. It suggests that this feature is
a way of creating a ‘knowing’ audience (as discussed for instance by Hutcheon and Leitch) out of filmgoers who cannot be assumed
to have read the original book. The article analyses how Atonement (2007) presents writing, cinema, and television in the three sections of the film and comments on how these media are presented
to the audience formally as well as through the complex narrative. It concludes with some comments on the film's ‘happy ending’,
suggesting that this foregrounding may, for some viewers, be at the expense of mainstream cinema's traditional investment
in emotion.
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