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Canons, Critical Approaches, and Contexts
Abstract
Although the teaching of adaptation in universities has been around for some time, the last 15 years have seen an explosion of scholarship and critical approaches that have influenced higher education syllabi in multifarious ways. However, even a brief look at course descriptions available online suggest that certain texts appear repeatedly on syllabi and that there are obvious similarities in the ways these courses are structured.1 This chapter examines these tendencies by offering a brief survey of a range of modules on adaptation offered in a number of universities in the US, the UK, and Australia to show that there are some ‘canonical’ primary texts and critical texts that underpin the study of the field and to some extent define its terms. It will then explore the benefits and limits of these canons and conclude with a discussion of the value and limits of a mixed cultural studies approach used by the author.
This essay discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions follow specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms. The acceptance of these proposals remains a matter of contention. One major obstacle involves the current Western Romantic view on art and culture. Having driven a rift between art and craft, Romanticism 2.0 opposes the aforesaid working definitions and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation, and adaptation. Finally, conclusions highlight some caveats foreshadowing resistance also against nudging back Romanticism 2.0 to its pre-Romantic views.
This essay discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions follow specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms.
The acceptance of these proposals remains a matter of contention. One major obstacle involves the current Western Romantic view on art and culture. Having driven a rift between art and craft, Romanticism 2.0 opposes the aforesaid working definitions, and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance, and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation and adaptation.
Finally, conclusions highlight some caveats foreshadowing resistance also against nudging back Romanticism 2.0 to its pre-Romantic views.
This chapter discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions follow specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms.
The acceptance of these proposals remains a matter of contention. One major obstacle involves the current Western Romantic view on art and culture. Having driven a rift between art and craft, Romanticism 2.0 opposes the aforesaid working definitions, and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance, and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation and adaptation.
Finally, conclusions highlight some caveats foreshadowing resistance also against nudging back Romanticism 2.0 to its pre-Romantic views.<br
This chapter discusses teaching screenwriting in terms of translation and adaptation. Since translation and adaptation scholars often use both terms interchangeably to signify semiosis or culture, section one suggests some more specific working definitions. Realigning terminology with everyday language, translation is redefined as an invariance-based phenomenon while adaptation is reconceived as a variance-based phenomenon, which entails better fit. More specific working definitions help at once specifying what one could be teaching or learning in more precise terms.
Definitional issues involve conceptual and epistemic boundaries, which stakeholders use to defend their interests. This ushers in section two, which discusses the current Western Romantic view on art and culture, and how having driven a rift between art and craft, it opposes the aforesaid conceptual boundaries, and disparages screenwriting, translation, and adaptation, lest they comply with the Romantic rule. Suggestions follow to re-open the Romantic view to its pre-Romantic stance, and to revalue both art and craft values in screenwriting, translation and adaptation.
Section three concludes with some caveats. Since it took Romanticism half a millennium to form and segregate its proper socio-cultural and economical tribes, nudging it back to its wider pre-Romantic views is not likely to succeed in the near future.<br
Instead of considering film and television adaptations in the context of the source texts they are adapting, this essay proposes
another context for their reception and analysis: the genre of adaptation itself. Focusing on the Hollywood traditions of
masculine adventure and feminine romance associated respectively with adaptations of Alexandre Dumas père and fils, it identifies
four genre markers common to both traditions that make it more likely a given adaptation will be perceived as an adaptation
even by an audience that does not know its source, and one anti-marker associated with adaptations in the tradition of the
younger Dumas but not the elder. The essay concludes by proposing adaptation as a model for all Hollywood genres.
By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production. © Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller 2013. Individual chapters, Respective authors 2013. Foreword, Hilary Radner 2013. All rights reserved.
Congratulations to Dr. McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA).These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now 'mainstreamed' in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed. McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including - the UK government's 'new sexual contract' to young women, - popular TV makeover programmes, - feminist theories of backlash and the 'undoing' of sexual politics, - feminism in a global frame- the 'illegible rage' underlying contemporary femininities.
In her glowing review of the film adaptation of bridget Jones's Diary, Molly Haskell delights in the intertextuality of the film and the ways it plays with audience knowledge of the book, its author, and the film's screenwriters and stars. Following her lead but turning it onto a broader subject, we might momentarily consider intertextuality's ability to wreak vengeance on our expectations of adaptation studies. Much of the critical literature on adaptation continues to refl ect expectations that films should simply translate their source material, and a film's value is assessed according to how faithfully it reproduces the original text. Scholars have called repeatedly for a move away from a criterion of faithfulness because of its limitation as a mode of criticism and its implied prioritizing of the literary over the cinematic, a hierarchy that allows little room for the popular novel adaptation. However, one of the reasons fidelity criticism remains prevalent in scholarly literature is the academy's emphasis on adaptations of canonical and literary novels. When a book has sold thousands of copies to the same audience that will go to see it on-screen, there is no longer a high culture imperative for textual faithfulness, and a language of authenticity (which allows for successful adaptations that do not strictly translate the novel to film and focuses on the audience's approval of the film) often replaces the language of fidelity. Not only does fidelity criticism limit the critic, it also limits the text, confining the adaptation to a compare-and-contrast analysis. Most adaptations, whether considered highly canonical or fashionably popular, resist this simplistic assessment, and from a diff erent perspective, an adaptation could be seen productively as a dynamic (if not vengeful) display of intertextuality. I propose that intertextuality is necessary for a move away from the binary of fidelity because "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." Nowhere is the notion of the absorption and transformation of another text more obvious, explicit, even self-conscious, than in adaptations.
This book interrogates representations of fatherhood across the spectrum of popular U.S. film of the early twenty-first century. It situates them in relation to postfeminist discourse, identifying and discussing dominant paradigms and tropes that emerge from the tendency of popular cinema to configure ideal masculinity in paternal terms. It analyses postfeminist fatherhood across a range of genres including historical epics, war films, westerns, bromantic comedies, male melodramas, action films, family comedies, and others. It also explores recurring themes and intersections such as the rejuvenation of aging masculinities through fatherhood, the paternalized recuperation of immature adult masculinities, the relationship between fatherhood in film and 9/11 culture, post-racial discourse in representations of fatherhood, and historically located formations of fatherhood. It is the first book length study to explore the relationship between fatherhood and postfeminism in popular cinema.
What lies behind current feminist discontent with contemporary cinema?.
Renowned literary scholar Linda Hutcheon explores the ubiquity of adaptations in all their various media incarnations and challenges their constant critical denigration. Adaptation, Hutcheon argues, has always been a central mode of the story-telling imagination and deserves to be studied in all its breadth and range as both a process (of creation and reception) and a product unto its own. Persuasive and illuminating, A Theory of Adaptation is a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres that may put an end to the age-old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park.
This article examines a set of post-9/11 Hollywood romantic comedies, arguing that these films innovate the genre by setting aside the light-hearted urban romanticization so characteristic of the form in favor of an anxious preoccupation with structural, national and gender stability. In keeping with the highly traditionalist discursive climate in the period of their release, Maid in Manhattan, Two Weeks' Notice, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days seek to reinforce conservative conceptions of masculinity and femininity through themes of historical reversion, postfeminist female retreatism, the (re)masculinization of moral, cultural and financial authority and the primacy of “family values.” Given recent events, it's no wonder that Hollywood's filmmakers have turned New York into the romantic-comedy capital of the world. (Jamie Russell 200351.
Russell, Jamie (2003) ‘End credits’, BBCi Films, 6 Feb View all references)
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Adaptable Bridget: generic intertextuality and postfeminism in Bridget Jones’s Diary’ in Authorship in Film Adaptation
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