Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry

Abstract

[T]he great innovators of twentieth century, in film and novel both, have had so little to do with each other, have gone their ways alone, always keeping a firm but respectful distance. George Bluestone, Novels into Film (63) I would suggest that what we need instead is a broader definition of and a sociology that takes into account commercial apparatus, audience, and academic culture industry. James Naremore, Introduction: Film and Reign of (10) Even a casual observer of field of studies would perceive that discipline is clearly suffering from intellectual dolours. Long regarded as bastard offspring of studies and film theory, studies struggled to achieve academic respectability since its inception in 1950s. The field's insistence on studying screen culture was perceived as threatening by English departments predicated on superiority of studies. Simultaneously, studies' residual attachment to print culture alienated it from burgeoning discipline of film theory, whose adherents proposed jettisoning an indelibly hostile studies paradigm in favor of valorizing film as an art form in its own right. But more worryingly, studies is currently experiencing a welter of criticism not only from outside its own ranks, but also from within. Adaptation scholar James Naremore laments jejune and moribund nature of contemporary studies (Introduction 1, 11). According to Robert B. Ray, bulk of adaptations criticism constitutes a dead end, useless in its stale models and trite suppositions (39,46). Similarly, Robert Stam-prolific scholar behind a recent three-volume series on for publisher Blackwell-asserts that studies as it currently stands is inchoate, hamstrung by inadequate trope of fidelity criticism, whereby screen adaptations are judged accordingly to their relative faithfulness to print originals (Beyond Fidelity 76, 62). For Thomas Leitch, adaptation theory remained tangential to thrust of film study, resulting in a discipline that has been marginalized because it wishes to be (Twelve Fallacies 149, 168).1 Kamilla Elliott, another recent addition to this chorus of disciplinary lament, regrets the pervasive sense that scholars lag behind critical times (4).2 Viewed in an optimistic light, such comments together suggest that studies as a field is currently bubbling with intellectual ferment, and is ripe for a sea-change in theoretical and methodological paradigms. Surveyed more pessimistically, remarks such as these suggest a field flailing to find some cohesion and to revivify its academic prospects. Regardless of which perspective is adopted, there is a substantial irony evident: as increasingly comes to comprise structural logic of contemporary media and cultural industries, leading scholars publicly question adequacy of field's established paradigms to comprehend what is taking place. Adaptation studies appears deeply internally conflicted: right discipline, at right time, lumbered with an obsolete methodology. Insider critics of studies base their disparaging verdicts on discipline's production of a seemingly endless stream of comparative case-studies of print and screen versions of individual texts (Ray 39). This methodology of comparative textual analysis underpinned studies' founding critical text-George Bluestone's Novels into Film-and since ossified into an almost unquestioned methodological orthodoxy within field. Adaptation critics seek similarities and contrasts in book-film pairings in order to understand specific characteristics of respective book and film mediums, in what Naremore termed an obsessive literary formalism (Introduction 9). Frustratingly, such studies routinely produce conclusions that provide in fact no conclusion at all: comparative case-studies overwhelmingly give rise to frankly unilluminating finding that there are similarities between two mediums, but also differences, before moving on to next book-film pairing to repeat exercise. …