Metadaptation: Adaptation and Intermediality Cock and Bull

Abstract

This article explores the usefulness of the term intermediality to account for hybrid intermedia and interart practices at the core of adaptation. Engaging with A Cock and Bull Story (2005), Michael Winterbottom's film adaptation based on Sterne's Tristram Shandy (175967), the analysis skirts the difficulties signaled by the terms fidelity, literature, taxonomy, and evaluation. Instead, the paper's method is based on isolating the levels of mediality, transmediality and intermediality. It holds that Winterbottom's film adaptation of a foundational metafiction lays bare the specific mediality not only of literature and film. The movie's system contamination is focused on the in-between process of adaptation. It follows that metadaptations (i.e., texts that foreground their own adaptive processes) constitute a heuristically rich subgenre among adaptations.