MATERIALIZING ADAPTATION THEORY:

THE ADAPTATION INDUSTRY

[T]he great innovators ofthe twentieth century, in filmand 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 ofadaptation and a sociology that
takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic culture industry.
James Naremore, "Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation" (10)
Eveti a casual observer ofthe field of adaptatioti studies would perceive that the discipline is clearly
sufferitig frotn ititellectual dolours. Long regarded as the bastard offspring of literary studies and
filtn theory, adaptation studies has struggled to achieve acadetnic respectability sitice its inception
iti the 1950s. The field's itisistence oti studying screen culture was perceived as threatening by
English departments predicated oti the superiority of literary studies. Sitnultatieously, adaptation
studies' residual attachmetit to print culture alienated it from the burgeoning discipline of filtn
theory, whose adherents proposed jettisoning an indelibly hostile literary studies paradigm in
favor of valorizing film as an art form in its own right. But more worryingly, adaptation stud-
ies is currently experiencing a welter of criticism not only fi-om outside its own ranks, but also
from within. Adaptation scholar James Naremore laments the "jejune" and "moribund" nature of
contemporary adaptation studies ("Introduction" 1,11). According to Robert B. Ray, the bulk of
adaptations criticism constitutes a "dead end," "useless" in its stale models and trite suppositions
(39,46). Similarly, Robert Stamprolific scholar behind a recent three-volume series on adapta-
tion for publisher Blackwellasserts that adaptation studies as it currently stands is "inchoate,"
hamstrung by the "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 has remained tangential to the thrust of film study," resulting
in a discipline that "has been marginalized because it wishes to be" ("Twelve Fallacies" 149,
168).' Kamilla Elliott, another recent addition to this chorus of disciplinary lament, regrets "the
pervasive sense that adaptation scholars lag behind the critical times" (4).^ Viewed in an optimistic
light, such comments together suggest that adaptation 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 fiailing to find some cohe-
sion and to revivify its academic prospects. Regardless of which perspective is adopted, there is
a substantial irony evident: as adaptation increasingly comes to comprise the structural logic of
contemporary media and cultural industries, leading adaptation scholars publicly question the
adequacy of the field's established paradigms to comprehend what is taking place. Adaptation
studies appears deeply internally conflicted: the right discipline, at the right time, lumbered with
an obsolete methodology.
Insider critics ofadaptation studies base their disparaging verdicts on the discipline's produc-
tion 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 adapta-
tion studies' founding critical textGeorge Bluestone's Novels into Filmand has since ossified
into an almost unquestioned methodological orthodoxy within the field. Adaptation critics seek
similarities and contrasts in book-fihn pairings in order to understand the specific characteristics
ofthe respective book and film mediums, in what Naremore has 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 the
frankly unilluminating finding that there are similarities between the two mediums, but also dif-
ferences, before moving on to the next book-film pairing to repeat the exercise.^ In its intellectual
tail-chasing and repetitive compulsion, adaptation studies reveals all the hallmarks of a discipline
in which adherence to an established methodology has become an endpoint in itself, with analytical
insight and methodological innovation relegated to secondary considerations.
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/5
Particularly concerning is the fact that such advocates of methodological innovation as do ex-
ist within the field frequently hark back to models already explored. Stam, under the subheading
"Proposals for Adaptation Studies," has recently called for "a thoroughgoing comparative stylistics
of the two media" [i.e. literature and film; emphasis in original]. This statement insistently recalls
Bluestone's lengthy exploration of literature and film's comparative aesthetic and formal character-
istics in the first chapter of his foundational 1957 work (Stam, "Introduction" 41). Although Stam
elsewhere argues compellingly for the cross-pollination of adaptation studies with developments
in post-structuralist and post-colonial literary theory, his emphasis on investigating formal char-
acteristics of literature and film appears merely to close the circle on nearly 50 years of adaptation
studies research. That this is a widely shared critical tic is evident from surveying the titles of key
books in the field over a five-decade period: the words "literature" and "film" (or their cognates
"fiction," "novel," "cinema," and "movies") are rearranged in endless conjoined variations."
Close attention to the published outputs of adaptation studies further evidences the becalmed
nature of the discipline in highlighting the piecemeal nature of current research. Scanning one's
eye down the contents pages of edited collections or journals in the field reveals a veritable forest
of italics, as the titles of individual books and their companion screen versions dominate entries.
The discipline suffers from a paucity of monograph-length investigations of adaptation theory,
instead confining its intellectual horizons overwhelmingly to the individual case-study or to the
compilation of many such case-studies.' A slight variation on this model is to group together a
number of adaptations of a single author (or single director's) work. But this is almost never framed
as an investigation of the role of the celebrity "Author" as a construct facilitating the making and
marketing of adaptations, so much as an organizing device for harnessing together otherwise
disparate case-studies. Most striking in such surveys of extant research is the exclusive seholarly
interest in what adaptations have been made, and almost never how these adaptations came to
be available for painstaking scholarly comparison. Dematerialized, immune to commercialism,
floating free of any cultural institutions, intellectual property regimes, or industry agents that
might have facilitated its creation or indelibly marked its form, the adaptation exists in perfect
quarantine fi-om the troubling worlds of commerce, Hollywood, and global corporate mediaa
formalist textual fetish oblivious to the disciplinary incursions of political economy, book history,
or the creative industries.^
Previous Waves of Innovation in Adaptation Studies
In taking adaptation studies to task for its uncritical adherence to textual analysis as a govern-
ing methodology, 1 am not suggesting that adaptation studies has been devoid of innovation,
only that such prior waves of innovation as have occurred have experimented within severely
confined limits. To provide background and context to this article's argument for an overdue
materializing of adaptation theory, it is useful briefly to survey the major schools of adaptation
studies that have developed since the 1950s and to notewith a nod to adaptations studies' own
modus operandiboth their diiferences and their marked similarities. Characterizing virtually all
academic studies of book-to-screen adaptation is an attack on the model of fidelity criticism as an
inadequate schema for appreciating the richness of and motivations driving adaptations (Marcus
xv; McDougal 6; Giddings, Selby, and Wensley xix, 9-10; Cartmell and Whelehan, Adaptations
3, The Cambridge Companion 2; Ray 45; Leitch, "Twelve Fallacies" 161-62, Film Adaptation
16-17,21; Hutcheon, A Theory xiii, 6-7, "In Defence"). Such ritual rejections of fidelity criticism
are fi-equently accompanied by revelation of fidelity critique's moralistic and sexually loaded
vocabulary, with its accusations of "unfaithfijlness," "betrayal," "straying," "debasement," and
the like (Beja 81; Naremore, "Introduction" 8; Stam, "Beyond Fidelity" 54, "Introduction" 3;
Hutcheon, "On the Art" 109, A Theory 7, 85, "in Defence"). Unquestionably, rejecting the idea of
film adaptation as a necessarily inferior imitation of literary fiction's artistic achievement was an
essential critical maneuver if adaptation studies was to gain entry to the academy. But most strik-
ing in reading back over 50 years of academic criticism about adaptation is not the dead hand of
fidelity criticism, but quite the oppositehow few academic critics make any claim for fidelity
criticism at all. Bluestone's own seminal study posited at its outset that "the film-maker merely
treats the novel as raw material and ultimately creates his [sic] own unique structure," with the
novel firmly put in its place as "less a norm than a point of departure" (vii; viii).'
6/Matedalizing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
A variation on the outright rejection of fidelity as directorial goal or critical norm involves
taxonomically classifying adaptations into graded "levels" or "modes" of fidelity, according to
"whether the film is a literal, critical, or relatively fi-ee adaptation of the literary source" (Klein
and Parker 9; also Wagner 219-31; Larsson 74; Andrew 29-34; Cahir 16-17). Certainly this goes
some way toward equalizing the respective status of author and director, according film adaptors
relatively greater creative and artistic agency. But fidelity is an absolute value; once a source text
has been "strayed" from, the critical measuring-stick of "fidelity" loses its evaluative rigor Given
this, comparative gradings of fidelity are closer to Bluestone's outright rejection of the concept
than may be apparent at first glance. In reading over several decades of adaptation criticism, the
suspicion grows that, while fidelity models may remain prevalent in film and television review-
ing, in broader journalistic discourse, and in everyday evaluations by the film-going public, m
academic circles the ritual slaying of fidelity criticism at the outset of a work has ossified into
a habitual gesture, devoid of any real intellectual challenge.* After all, if no one in academe is
actually advocating the antiquated notion of fidelity, what is there to overturn? It appears more
likely that the standardized routing of fidelity criticism has come to function as a smokescreen,
lending the guise of methodological and theoretical innovation to studies that routinely reproduce
the set model of comparative textual analysis. In its hermetism, it is as though parallel intellec-
tual streams of film studies, media studies, the history of the book, and cultural theory had not
all vigorously explored the interpretative significance of production, distribution, reception, and
consumption contexts.
The second significant wave of adaptation studies appeared from the late 1970s with the
importation of principles of narratology from the traditions of Russian formalist literary theory,
structuralism, and Continental semiotics (Cohen; Beja; Ruppert; Klein and Parker; Andrew).
Theorists such as Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Christian Metz were heavily cited in this
stream of adaptation work that lingered, in some cases, well into the 1990s (Giddings, Selby and
Wensley; McFarlane).' The surprise is the tenacity of narratology's hold over adaptation studies,
given that by the late 1980s post-structuralist distrust of the rule-seeking, pseudo-scientistic pre-
dilections of structuralism had well and truly achieved dominance in the Anglophone academy.
The structuralist-inspired quest to isolate the signifying "codes" underpinning both literature and
film had the worthwhile aim of dismantling received academic hierarchies of mediums in which
literature occupied the apex, and the interloper of screen studies was relegated to the lowest criti-
cal echelons (Cohen 3). It moreover recast adaptation as a two-way dynamic, where novelistic
narrative techniques not only influenced film, but certain filmic devices were avidly imitated by
Modernist writers well-versed in an increasingly visual culture (Cohen 2-10; Beja 51 -76; Andrew
36). But the structuralist school of adaptation confines this inter-relationship of the two mediums
strictly to the level of textual effects. Structuralism's characteristic isolation of texts fi-pm circuits
of production and consumption, or from sociologies of media cultures generally, left its method-
ological impress upon adaptation studies. The effect was that, for all the narratological school's
self-declared and partially justifiable revolutionary rhetoric, the movement managed to entrench
flirther the practice of textual analysis as adaptation studies' default methodological setting and
unquestioned academic norm.'"
In what this article posits as the third major wave of innovation in adaptation studies, import-
ing of concepts fi-om post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism, and cultural studies broke
down one part of the self-isolating critical wall built up around the text, and opened adaptation
studies up to concepts of audience agency. This 1980s and 1990s development, handily dubbed
"The Impact of the Posts" by one of its key proponents, Robert Stam, placed audience pleasure in
intertextual citation fi-ont and center of its critical concerns ("Introduction" 8). Accordingly, fidelity
criticism was deemed not only a woefully blunt instrument with which to examine adaptations, but
willfiil ^fidelity was in fact the very point: adaptations interrogated the political and ideological
underpinnings of their source texts, translating works across cultural, gender, racial, and sexual
boundaries to secure cultural space for marginalized discourses. This post-structuralist reconcep-
tualization of adaptation as critiquewhich Stam terms "intertextual dialogism" and Hutcheon
dubs "transculturation"borrows from Bakhtin and Kristeva to posit culture as a vast web of
references and tropes ripe for appropriating, disassembling, and rearranging [italics in original]
(Stam, "Beyond Fidelify" 64; Hutcheon, A Thoery xvi; Leitch, "Twelve Fallacies" 165-67, Film
Adaptation 18; Hutcheon, "On the Art" 108-11, "In Defence"; Aragay). More specifically cultural
studies-inflected concepts that also reinvigorated the study of adaptation included the permeability
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/7
of high/pop cultural boundaries, overdue acknowledgement of extra-literary sources for adaptations
such as pulp fiction, comic books/graphic novels, and computer games, and recognition of resistant
or oppositional audience decodings of texts in ways possibly unforeseen by textual producers
(Cartmell and Whelehan, Adaptations, The Cambridge Companion; Hutcheon, ^4 Theory; Leitch,
Film Adaptation). The recognition that audiences appreciate adaptations precisely because ofthe
mass of existing pop-cultural knowledge they bring to them was decisive in weaning adaptation
studies from its long preoccupation with the nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary canon,
and for introducing an ethnographic dimension into the analysis ofadaptation.
Yet, for all its productive theoretical innovation, this now-dominant third wave ofadaptation
studies has come at a price. Post-structuralism's and cultural studies' characteristic disinterest in
conditions of cultural production has created a lopsidedness within adaptation studies between,
on one hand, intense interest in audience consumption practices but, on the other, little counter-
vailing attention to the production contexts, financial structures, and legal regimes facilitating the
adaptations boom. The blame for this imbalance cannot, however, be entirely sheeted home to
post-structuralism, cultural studies, and their affiliate "posts."
Political economy, the school of media studies dominant in UK, Canadian, and Australian (if
never US) academe during the 1960s and 1970s was, by the 1980s, engaged in a bitter academic
turf-war with cultural studies over the relative merits of material and semiotic frameworks for
analyzing media (Curran). As a result, political economy was too impatient with the new wave's
rejection of economically determinist Marxist cultural models to be inclined to investigate what
reception theory had to offer for political economy's understanding ofadaptation. Furthermore,
political economy's traditional home in the social sciences (especially in politics and sociology
departments) made industrial-scale cultural producers such as newspaper chains and television
networks favored media for examination, in preference to the traditionally humanities-affiliated
(and specifically literary studies-affiliated) format ofthe book. The content recycling function at
the heart ofadaptation was noted in passing by individual political economists ofthe 1970s in
analyses of "synergy" within the operations of globalized media conglomerates (Murdock and
Golding). But as the waves of consolidation that brought book publishing into the fold of corporate
media were at that time mostly still to be felt, novels and short stories were paid only glancing
attention by political economy as the most common source of adapted content. More vigorous
attention has been paid to such content's fi^nchising in film, newspaper serialization, theme-park,
and spin-off merchandising forms (Wasko, Hollywood, Understanding Disney, How Hollywood;
Elsaesser; Balides). Neither macro-oriented political economy nor textual- and audience-focused
cultural studies were therefore predisposed to examine the how and why ofadaptation from the
perspective of the authors, agents, publishers, editors, book prize committees, screenwriters,
directors, and producers who actually made adaptations happen.
A final point to make in tracing how the study ofthe contemporary book-to-screen adaptation
industry slipped through the intellectual net ofadaptation studies, cultural studies and political
economy relates to the kind of texts chosen for analysis by these respective disciplines. As out-
lined, adaptation studies has traditionally focused greatest attention on the nineteenth-century and
Modernist Anglophone literary canon (Lupack; Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye, and Whelehan). Cultural
studies, for its part, originated in another disciplinary rebellionthis time against English literary
studies' adamantine hostility to investigating popular culture as a legitimate topic for academic
inquiry. As a consequence, cultural studies has always preferred to examine demonstrably "popu-
lar" genres such as romance novels, pulps, crime fiction, westerns, or comic books whose very
non-literariness badges them as suitable new intellectual ground for cultural studies' relativist
analytical project. The combined effect of these disciplines' textual orientation is that the processes
by which contemporary literary fiction is created, published, marketed, evaluated for literary
prizes and adapted for screen are still to receive sustained and detailed academic attention. That
these powerful institutions comprising the contemporary literary adaptation ecosystemwith all
the dynamism, symbiosis, and competition characteristic of ecosystemshave been overlooked
by cognate disciplines has bequeathed to scholars a severely flawed understanding of how the
contemporary adaptation industry actually functions. Attention to texts and audiences cannot of
itself explain how these adaptations come to be available for popular and critical consumption, nor
the production circuits through which they move on their way to audiences, nor the mechanisms
of cultural elevation in which the adaptation industry is fundamentally complicit.
8/Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
The Costs of Textual Analysis as Methodologlcat Orthodoxy
Having sketched the background of extant adaptation studies and noted its methodological lacunae,
I want to proceed to examine in further detail how lack of attention to production contexts has
compromised current understandings of adaptation. From there, I propose an alternative model that
is capable of encapsulating the complexity of the adaptation industry andas the current article's
title statesof contributing to a long-overdue materializing of adaptation theory.
Adaptation critics' comparative ignorance of book industry dynamics has perpetuated a distorted
understanding of adaptation, distilled here to three oft-encountered "myths" or "truisms" of adap-
tation studies." The first of theseand by far the most frequently encounteredis the claim that
books are the product of individualized, isolated authorial creation, whereas film and television
function as collaborative, industrialized processes (Beja 60-62; McDougal 5; Giddings, Selby,
and Wensley 2; Reynolds 8; Ray 42; Stam, "Beyond Fidelity" 56, "Introduction" 17; Cahir 72).
As so often when seeking the origins of adaptation studies' methodological rubric, the roots of
this fallacy can be traced directly back to Bluestone (Leitch, "Twelve Fallacies" 150):
The reputable novel, generally speaking, has been supported by a small, literate audience, has
been produced by an individual writer, and has remained relatively free of rigid censorship. The
film, on the other hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced co-operatively under
industrial conditions, and restricted by a self-imposed Production Code. These developments have
reinforced rather than vitiated the autonomy of each medium, (vi)'^
In seeking to debunk this myth of isolated authorial creation, I am not denying that a clear dif-
ference in organizational and financial scale exists between the writing of, for example, a battle
scene in a novel and the filmic realization of its equivalent. The problem arises from the fact that
adaptation critics when they use the terms "book" or "novel" are in truth almost always speaking
of "text"that is, they are invoking an abstract idea of an individual author's creative work rather
than the material object of the specific book in which that work is transmitted.'^ As the discipline
known as book history has amply demonstrated since first emerging in 1950s France (curiously
contemporaneous with the appearance of adaptation studies in the Anglophone academy), books
have for centuries depended upon complex circuits of printers, binders, hawkers, publishers,
booksellers, librarians, collectors, and readers for the dissemination of ideas in literate societies
(Damton; Adams and Barker). Thus the book is demonstrably as much the product of institutions,
agents, and material forces as is the Hollywood blockbuster. Yet adaptation theorists regularly
emphasize the power of Hollywood's political economy as though books were quasi-virginal
texts untouched by commercial concerns prior to their screen adaptation (Beja; Bluestone; Leitch,
"Twelve Fallacies"). This leads to curious and easily disproved assertions that authors "have (for
better or worse) been largely able to write whatever pleased them, without regard for audience or
expense" (Ray 42), as "questions of material infrastructure enter only at the point of distribution"
(Stam, "Beyond Fidelity" 56).
Book history has demonstrated that the commercial substructures of book culture have existed
since at least the Gutenberg revolution. But these industrial characteristics have become massively
more pronounced since book publishers were subsumed by global media conglomerates from
the early 1980s onwards (Miller; Schiffrin; Epstein; Murray, "Content Streaming"). Critics of
the contemporary book publishing industry frequently observe that the potential marketability of
authors, and the probability of their work being optioned for adaptation in other media, are key
considerations in the signing of, especially, first-time authors (Engelhardt; McPhee). Moreover,
these considerations all come into phy prior to contracting; thereafter the book will also be exten-
sively costed, edited, designed, proof-read, marketed, publicized, and distributed to retail and online
outlets, (hopefully) discussed in the literary public sphere, and readers' perceptions of the work
will have been extensively mediated through networks of reviews, book prizes, writers festivals,
book signings, face-to-faee book clubs, or their electronic and online equivalents (Hartley; Long;
Sedo; Mackenzie; Hutcheon, "In Defence"). A complex literary economy therefore governs the
production and dissemination of books fi-om their earliest phases. Moreover, adaptation for the
screen is not merely an add-on or afler-thought to this complex economy, but is factored in and
avidly pursued from the earliest phases of book production. This gives the lie to the oft-repeated
mantra of authorial "autonomy" prevalent in adaptation studies and such critics' familiar juxtaposi-
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/9
tion ofthe Romanticized, "starving-in-a-garret" individual writer on one hand, with Hollywood's
"mode of industrial production" on the other (Bluestone 34).
Further, understanding of the book industry economy fundamentally challenges adaptation
theory's always implicitand often even explicitclassification of books as "niche" whereas
film is denominated as a "mass" medium (Beja 60-61; Giddings, Selby, and Wensley 2; Leitch,
"Twelve Fallacies" 155; Hutcheon, A Theory 5). When analyzing the weight of financial interests
and industry strategizing brought to bear on the release of new books by bestselling writers such
as Stephen King or Dan Brownor even high-profile literary authors such as Salman Rushdie,
Ian McEwan, or Annie Proulxit is impossible to deny that the book industry is as thoroughly
complicit in marketing and publicity processes as are its screen-media equivalents (Gelder; Brown;
Phillips; Squires). The fact that book publishers and film studios increasingly find themselves
affiliate divisions within overarching media conglomerates makes the incorporation ofthe book
into the production, marketing, and distribution schedules of electronic and digital media all the
more feasible and attractive (Izod; Murray, "Content Streaming," "Generating Content").
A second myth of adaptation studies deriving from critics' current dematerialized conception of
the process is the belief that adaptation's trajectory is necessarily from the "old" media ofthe book
to the "new(er)" media of film, television, and digital media. This assumed linearity is manifested
explicitly in the titles of adaptation studies such as Brian McFarlane's Novel to Fi/m and Linda
Costanzo Cahir's Literature into Film.''' Clearly, this fallacy stems from a historicist conception of
media development in which mediums are seen to supersede earlier communication technologies
in a process of serial eclipse. Instead, the reality of twentieth-century media environments has
been that newer media do cannibalize the content of older media, but mediums continue to exist
contemporaneously, rearranging themselves into new patterns of usage and mutual dependence.
This complementarity of communications formats was noted in media studies as early as the
work of Marshall McLuhan, and has since been regularly elaborated upon by medium theorists,
notably Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their exploration of cross-platform "remedia-
tion" (McLuhan; Bolter and Grusin; Holmes). Given these intellectual trends in the broader field
of communications, adaptation studies' long-held adherence to a one-way model of adaptation
appears intellectually parochial.
Granted, even Bluestone devoted a paragraph to the observation that "OJust as one line of influ-
ence runs from New York publishing house to Hollywood studio, another line may be observed
running the other way" (4). But his discussion notes only the positive impact of film versions on
sales ofthe original novel; he does not extend his observation to examine how film content can
form the basis of new print-form products.'^ Writing over 20 years after Bluestone, critic Morris
Beja similarly dedicated two pages of a monograph-length work to discussing the coexistence of
novelizations and original novels, but he begins this potentially innovative line of inquiry with the
tellingly digressive throw-away "incidentally" (87). As far as the first two waves of adaptations
studies were concerned, the book industry served as handmaiden supplying film-ready content to
the screen industries; it was a relationship between mediums reciprocated only intermittently.
By the time the third wave of adaptation studies emerged in the 1980s, the increasing evidence
of adaptation's print-based "afterlife" in the form of "tie-in" editions, novelizations, published
screenplays, "making-off' books, and companion titles had become incontestable. Equipped with
greater sensitivity to popular culture as a result of cultural studies and post-structuralist theoretical
models, adaptation scholars began to note the proliferation of such book-form texts, and even their
circulation simultaneous with screen versions. Again, this belated recognition of adaptation's two-
way (or multi-way) traffic is fiagged in the title of an influential anthology: Cartmell and Whelehan's
Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. But such critics' use of these "companion texts"
istrue to the discipline's generally unacknowledged textual analysis biasto treat them as
convenient additional sites for semiotic analysis, not to examine how they came to be produced or
their role in cross-promoting content franchises to a variety of audience demographics (Whelehan
5-6; cf. Izod 101-02). What is currently lacking in adaptation studies is a thorough understanding
of whose financial interests these "spin-ofF' properties serve, the intellectual property and licens-
ing arrangements by which they are governed, and how audiences experience this multi-platfonn
encounter with broadly similar contentspecifically whether audiences invest content consumed
on different platforms with varying degrees of cultural prestige or authority.
10/Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
The third and final corollary ofadaptation studies' prevailing indifference to the economy of
book adaptation is perhaps not as strongly marked as the first two, given it concerns the more
abstruse concept ofthe rise and fall of literary reputations. Literary prestige has remained a mostly
marginalized topic in adaptation studies, being either already abundantly established in the case
of "classic" authors whose canonical works are adapted for the screen or, in the case of popular
culture texts such as comic books, amounting to an irrelevant concern according the relativist
rubric of cultural studies (Stam, "Introduction" 45). Rarely examined is the phenomenon of
contemporary writers who self-identify as "literary" authors whose work is being adapted for the
screen, and how circulation of these broadly contemporaneous screen texts triggers inflation or
devaluation of their literary stocks." The stock-exchange metaphor invoked here is deliberate;
as James F. English has observed in his analysis of cultural prizes. The Economy of Prestige, the
fascination of questions of literary value derives fi^om their position at the juncture of two philo-
sophically hostile conceptual systems: the aesthetic and the commercial. The concept of literary
esteem is never entirely reducible to either system operating alone, but is instead powered by its
situation at the clashing tectonic plates of both systems. How adaptations factor into this innately
volatile system for accrediting or withholding of literary reputation is a compelling topic mostly
unexplored in relation to contemporary authors (as opposed to long-canonical, and more recently
mass-market, authors such as Jane Austen)." The topic's interest stems also from its intermesh-
ing with the broader literary and cultural economy of agents, editors, publishers, prize judging
committees, book retailers, and the literary press already mentioned. Focusing critical attention
on literary reputations in the process of being "brokered" within the adaptation economy provides
a fascinating insight into the workings ofthe adaptation industry, and the shifting alliances and
conflicts that inevitably arise between its nodal agents.
Proposing a New Methodology for Adaptation Studies
From the foregoing, it will be readily apparent that this article's key aim is to rethink adaptation,
not as an exercise in comparative textual analysis of individual books and their screen versions,
but as a material phenomenon produced by a system of institutional interests and actors. In
short, I am contending that adaptation studies urgently needs to divert its intellectual resources
fi-om a questionable project of aesthetic evaluation, and instead begin to understand adaptation
sociologically.'^ To do so, it is necessary to move out fi-om under the aegis of long-dominant
formalist and textual analysis traditions to investigate what cognate fields of cultural research
might have to offer adaptation studies in terms of alternative methodologies. These then need to
be critically assessed for their own analytical blind-spots, as well as for how they might profit-
ably be combined into a hybrid methodology supple enough to comprehend the workings ofthe
contemporary adaptation industry.
Political Economy of Media
The political economy strand of media analysis originates in the critiques ofthe early-twentieth-
century Frankfiirt School, reviving with an interest in issues of ownership and control of media in
the 1960s and 1970s, and informing a more recent wave of research around the commercialization
of digital media. These most recent additions to the discipline have demonstrated the vital relevance
of materially engaged critique for elucidating developments in the contemporary cultural sphere
(Mosco; Schiller; Wasko, Understanding Disney, How Hollywood; Doyle). Political economy's
realist, materialist, and interdisciplinary methodology critically illuminates content's key role in
contemporary media industries. Technological convergence around digital platforms has coincided
with increasing convergence of ownership among globalized media corporations to create a com-
mercial environment favoring the multipurposing or "streaming" of media content to orchestrate
cross-platform fi-anchises (Elsaesser; Balides; Murray, "Media Convergence's," "Brand Loyalties";
Jenkins). The key characteristic and commercial utility of contemporary media content appears to
lie in its potential dissociation from any one media platform and its simultaneous replication across
a range of mediums via digitization. Clearly this is adaptation operating under a different name.
However, for reasons that are more institutional than theoretical, political economy of media has,
as outlined earlier, tended to relegate the book to the periphery of its analytical concern because
of an inherited preference for broadcast and networked media.
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/11
Cultural Theory
Compelling as is political economy's materialist conceptualization of contemporary media indus-
tries, on its own it provides an inadequate schema for understanding the adaptation industry's role
in brokering cultural value. In contemporary globalized media conglomerates, book publishing
is of relatively minor commercial significance in terms of its contribution to overall corporate
revenues. Yet publishing divisions continue to enjoy a high profile within such conglomerates
as a source of prestige and as ballast for corporate claims to cultural distinction. How is it that
book content is increasingly dematerialized from the book format through digital technology
and adaptation, while at the same time screen producers attempt to leverage books' associations
of cultural prestige and literary distinction across media platforms? Examples of such cinematic
bibliophily might include the fetishizing of libraries, illuminated books, parchment maps, quills,
and ink in Time Warner's film adaptations of book favorites Harry Potter and The Lord ofthe
Rings (Murray, "A Book"; Jenkins 169-205). On one hand, media industries would appear to
be pursuing a culturally democratizing agenda of making acclaimed literary works available to
demographically broader screen audiences. But, at the same time, such industrial concems allay
audience suspicions of commercial exploitation by constantly reiterating film-makers' respect for
a content property's prize-winning literary pedigree. Thus cultural hierarchies are, paradoxically,
kept alive by the same industry that pushes audiences to consume near-identical content across
multiple media platforms.
Existing cultural theory models are inadequate to comprehend this nexus of commercial and
cultural values at play in the modem adaptation industry. Most likely, this is attributable to the fact
that critical theory and cultural studies have tended to develop theories of cultural value in relative
isolation from the material industry contexts that preoccupy political economy. Such disparate
critical foci have given rise to a disjunction between, on one hand, cultural studies' orthodoxies
of textual relativism and, on the other, the media industries' avid support of cultural hierarchy
as evidenced in their marketing and publicity strategies emphasizing consumer discrimination
and cultural self-improvement (Collins). Adaptations studies thus requires a methodological and
theoretical apparatus for understanding how audiences both desire cultural relativism while also
looking to the media industries for markers of cultural prestige (book prizes, film and television
awards) to guide consumption and identity-formation.
History of Ihe Book
The third cognate methodology proposed here, history ofthe book (also termed "book history"),
traces its own complex disciplinary history from French historical studies, sociology, literary stud-
ies, bibliography, and the history of ideas to coalesce as an academic discipline fi-om the late-1970s.
Like political economy, book history insists upon the material underpinnings of conceptions of
culture, focusing specifically on the mechanics of print production, dissemination, and reception.
The field's most productive innovation from the perspective of revitalizing adaptation stiidies is
its devising of circuit-based models for conceptualizing the flow of print culture in host societies
(Damton; Adams and Barker). Specifically, these models of interlinked authors, printers, publishers,
retailers, and the like maintain attention to the industrial and commercial substructures ofthe book
trade, but they integrate these concems with attention also to less tangible intellectual, social, and
cultural currents, demonstrating the interdependence ofthe two spheres. Less compelling for the
current project's purpose is that book historyas its self-designation suggestsoverwhelmingly
confines its attention to pre-twentieth-century print cultures, and has to date generally failed to
embrace the contemporary book industries as part of its natural purview (Murray, "Publishing
Studies").
Thus the three methodologies outlined here could all alreadyhypothetically speakinghave
converged on the issue ofthe contemporary adaptation industry, but have to date mostly failed to
do so for reasons of their own. This anomalous state of affairs cries out to be rectified, especially
at a time when leading scholars of adaptation are lamenting the methodological stagnation ofthe
field. By combining these three fields' methodological insights, adaptation studies stands to gain
a new, intellectually invigorating methodology: alert to the commercial and industrial structures
of global media; wise to these systems' simultaneous invocation and disavowal of hierarchies
of cultural value; and capable of holding these two domainsthe material and the culturalin
dynamic relationship.
12/Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
Modeling the Adaptation Industry
The present article's conceptual framework for a new model of what has been termed "the adapta-
tion industry" derives from the aforementioned circuit models prominent in book history that chart
the circulation and flow of print communications among various book industry stakeholders."
Substantially modifying such historically focused models to reflect the dynamics of contemporary
English-language book cultures, the new model maps relationships among six key stakeholder
groups: author societies and the construct ofthe celebrity author; literary agents; editors and pub-
lishers; literary prize judging committees; screenwriters; and film/television producers. Granted,
this is a resiliently "bookish" model of adaptation given this article's acknowledgement elsewhere
that adaptation traffics content across all media formats: film, television, computer gaming, com-
ics, theatre, recorded music, animation, toys, and myriad other licensed commodities. But this
focus upon adaptation studies' traditional book and screen mediums is defensible given the near-
absence of a production-oriented stream of adaptation research to date. It is hoped that the project
proposed here clears sufficient methodological ground for others to examine in detail the specific
economies of adaptation between other mediumsor even, more ambitiously, to attempt to chart
the workings ofthe entire cross-media adaptation industry in macro perspective.
Each ofthe nodal points in the book-screen adaptation economy is connected by the two-way
flow of capital (both commercial and cultural): the author sacrifices a commission payment in
exchange for the increased access to publishers provided by a literary agent. Literary agents trade
upon their gate-keeping fUnction to ensure clients' submissions gain priority attention by commis-
sioning editors. Publishing houses enhance the status of specific literary prizes in their cover-copy
in exchange for the promotional fillip and exposure of a literary prize win or shortlisting. Literary
prizes and their associated sales deliver proven audiences for film and television adaptations of
prize-winning books, in exchange for wider promotion ofthe prize itself through screen-media
formats. This in tum commonly stokes audience demand for (re)consumption of content in book
form^the only part ofthe current model already touched upon by adaptation critics.
In addition to these exchanges among adjacent stakeholders in the adaptations circuit, there
are complex capital exchanges between non-adjacent interests: for example, literary agents de-
rive commission on rights sales to film and television production companies in exchange for the
brand identity of an established author or book property. Publishers engineer bookshop display
for film adaptation posters and ancillary marketing paraphemalia, in exchange for production
stills to incorporate into the cover designs of film or television "tie-in"' editions (Bluestone 4;
Giddings, Selby, and Wensley 22; Reynolds 10; Naremore, "Introduction" 13). Similarly, suc-
cessful authors can aid in establishing the house identity of their publishers, and thereby attract
other desirable "name" authors to the press. Equally, authors benefit symbiotically from the im-
primatur of appearing under the colophon of an esteemed publishing house. A detailed mapping
ofthe adaptation industry would need to focus in tum upon each of these nodal agents, but with
a constant emphasis upon the interdependence and tensions inherent in these deeply intertwined
sectoral relationships.
One corollary of adapting circuit models from book history is an awareness of the historical
specificity of book industry structures. Any mapping of the contemporary adaptation industry
thus needs to take account of aspects ofthe book tradesuch as the rise ofthe literary agent and
the growth of online retailingwhich have become ubiquitous only in recent decades. A sug-
gested timeframe for such research might therefore be circa 1980 to the present. This timeframe
is broad enough to incorporate significant structural changes to the book industry occurring as a
result of corporatization and conglomeration from the early 1980s: the revolutionary impact of
digital technologies on all phases of book production, distribution, and retailing; the eclipse of
the editor by the agent as the author's literary mentor and champion; the elevation of book prizes
in promotional campaigns by English-language publishers (notably the [Man] Booker Prize)^;
and the marked growth of "subsidiary" rights in non-book media as a feature of standard author-
publisher contracts during the period.
Focusing industry-centered adaptation research on such a recent period moreover acts as a
corrective to adaptation studies' long privileging of "classic" Renaissance, eighteenth-century,
nineteenth-century, and Modemist texts in its analyses (Giddings, Selby and Wensley; Lupack;
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/13
Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye, and Whelehan; Mayer; Elliott; Stam, "Introduction"). The much longer
cultural histories of such texts cause them to enter the contemporary adaptation economy already
fi-eighted with critical approbation and/or notoriety. The exclusion of already-established "classics"
from the proposed model ensures that the pre-existing cultural baggage of "classic" texts does
not distort the findings or introduce variables that cannot be accounted for by the dynamics of
the contemporary adaptation industry itself This being said, there is no reason that the proposed
materialist methodology should not also be applicable to others' studies of "classic" text adapta-
tions occurring in earlier eras ofthe book, radio, film, and television industries.
A mapping of the contemporary adaptations industry must also acknowledge linguistic and
geographic specificities. Overwhelmingly, adaptation studies has, to date, focused on English-lan-
guage texts, or upon film adaptations in languages other than English of Anglophone "classics."^'
This is one element of extant adaptation studies that I would argue in favor of perpetuating, not
for the sake of tradition itself, but because it is important to recognize the variability ofthe adap-
tations process across countries and regional language groupings (for example, the widespread
audience acceptance of dubbing in Continental European screen media, the specific conventions
of the telenovela in Hispanic media cultures, and the importance of print-format manga to the
Japanese anime industry). Hence, the project advocated here would focus upon content created,
distributed, and consumed within the Anglophone world. The US and UK. still account for the
overwhelming majority ofthe world's English-language cultural production. Yet there are clearly
points of access into these global distribution systems for content from historically "periphery"
English-language cultures such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and
India. That being said, there is no question that if such second-tier media-producing countries wish
to gain exposure for their content to global English-language audiences, it will be in collaboration
with or through acquiescence to US and UK cultural gatekeepers. Undertaking detailed mapping
ofthe contemporary adaptations industry thus not only informs debates around cultural value,
but also enhances formation and implementation of cultural policy at national and supranational
levels to facilitate cultural "contra-flow."
Where might adequate research resources be located to empirically bear out such an industry-
focused model? Perhaps textual analysis has for so long remained the default methodological
setting for adaptation studies because the requisite book and screen case-studies are so readily
to hand in the age ofthe VCR and DVD library.^^ An important practical question therefore is
whether alternative resources are available to implement the proposed methodological model
and to support the theoretical suppositions raised here. As outlined above, one of adaptations
studies' chief aims should be to bring academic discourses into dialogue with adaptation industry
practices, an exchange that has to date barely taken place. One result of these domains' current
lack of cross-pollination is that academic research analyzing contemporary industry dynamics is
scanty, necessitating a multi-perspectival approach to collating research materials. Key resources
would include:
Extant scholarly research in adaptation studies, media studies, film studies, history of
the book, and cultural theory, as outlined above;
memoire/autobiographies^iographies of authore, literary agents, publishers, film agents,
screenwriters, screen producers, and directors;
"cultural sphere" publications (i.e. non-aeademic cultural publications such as broad-
sheet newspaper arts and culture supplements, book review magazines, little magazines, film
reviews, television guides);
trade publications (i.e. book and screen industry-specific periodicals and commissioned
reports);
archives (e.g. the Booker Prize Archive at Oxford Brookes University (UK)," and
British publishers' archives at the University of Reading (UK)";
popular media, trade press and academic interviewing of authors, agents, publishers,
literary prize judges, screenwriters, directors, and producers;
para- and extra-textual evidence (e.g. book covers; film and television promotional
materials, book prize publicity materials distributed at retail point of sale);
popular culture meditations on the "anxiety of adaptation" (e.g. films such as Spike
}onze's Adaptation [2002Y^; Richard K.v/\emowsk\'s Love and Death on Long Island [\99S]; Ihe
Coen brothers' Barton Fink [ 1991 ]; and book and film industry satirical novels).
14/ Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
Hence, myriad resources exist to verify empirically the workings of the contemporary adaptation
industry; that adaptation scholars have, to date, made comparatively little use of such widely
dispersed resources probably speaks of a reluctance to traverse established humanities and social
sciences research protocols. But given that adaptation is itself the original interdisciplinary aca-
demic undertaking, such pusillanimous respect for boundaries for their own sake would seem to
have no place in the charting of a new approach for the discipline.
Conclusion: Benefits of an Industry-centric Adaptation Modet
Belated reformulation of adaptation theory to account for the industrial dimensions of adaptation
in contemporary media cultures stands to benefit multiple constituencies. For academic adaptation
studies, such an innovation would shake off the enervating sense of a discipline sunk in the dol-
drums, and would productively reconnect the field to cognate areas in cultural analysis, hybridizing
its methodology and adding theoretical nuance to its governing models. Importantly for scholars
already invested in the discipline, such cross-pollination would challenge other streams' pejorative
verdict upon adaptation studies as a jejune theoretical backwater. A new adaptation model would
take account of adaptation's role as the driving force in contemporary multiplatform media, and
would seek to replicate this commercial centrality by according adaptation an equi valently central
role in theorizations of twenty-first-century culture.
That adaptation is culturally ubiquitous has long been remarked upon by commentators (Orr 4;
Naremore, "Introduction" 15; Elliott4,6; Hutcheon, "OntheArt,"^ Theoryxi, 2, "In Defence").
Without question it is steadily becoming more so. Some commentators observe this phenomenon
fi-om the specific perspective of audience and reception research, others from the more generalist
vantage point of participation in "mass culture" (Larsson 81). More recently, cross-platform traf-
fic of content has also been analyzed textually in narratological, semiotic, and post-structuralist
terms (Stam, "Beyond Fidelity," "Introduction" 11-12,28). Missing from this academic equation
is a third stream of research that would provide the necessary production-oriented perspective
on adaptation to complement existing approaches. But rather than seeing production-focused
analysis as merely a corrective to existing critical imbalances and thus as an end in itself, the
current project flags how conceptualizing the industrial substructures of adaptation provides
new understandings of why texts take the shape they do and how they influence or respond to
audience evaluation. Hence a focus on production in the digital age provides a new dimension to
adaptation research, but it also calls into question media studies' traditional tripartite division into
production/text/audience categories. Production matters; but who is the producer and who is the
audience in an era of infinite digital reproducibility, collective creation, and "producerly" media
practice remains an open question (Bruns).
More specific than these benefits accruing to the scholarly community as a whole are the pay-
offs such a study promises for the commonly marginalized discipline of print culture or publishing
studies. Rather than perceiving the book as the rapidly obsolescing poor cousin to ever-burgeoning
screen media, studying the adaptation industry reveals the continuing prominence of book-derived
content in the multimedia age. This is true whether or not print formats serve as audiences' initial
point of entry into a content fi-anchise. For even a cursory glance at contemporary mainstream
media culture reveals that audiences introduced to book content in screen-media versions often
subsequently consume the same narratives in their original novel format, orwhere the content
is original to screenaudiences may seek out novelizations, making-of books, or companion
volumes to prolong, enrich, and potentially complicate their content experience. Robert Stam's
briefly elucidated concept of "post-celluloid" adaptation is apposite here ("Introduction" 11).
Although Stam's use of the term appears to denote the impact upon film culture of technological
developments in digital and online media, clearly digital content is also remediated into resolutely
analogue formats such as the printed book. Audiences demand, evaluate, and sometimes "rewrite"
such cross-platform content in unpredictable ways, disproving media historicists' assumptions that
younger audiences are necessarily most loyal to more recently developed mediums.
Finally, the third constituency that stands to benefit from mapping of the contemporary An-
glophone adaptation economy is the book, film, television, and licensing sector practitioners
who are engaged in the actual mechanics of adaptation at the cultural coalface. To date, such
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/15
industry participants have been inadequately served by "how to" guides that confine themselves
to pragmatic issues of realizing individual adaptation projects, without providing an overview of
the adaptation process from a critical, macro-oriented perspective (Seger). For cultural producers
in second-tier or traditionally "periphery" Anglophone nations, it is especially crucial in cultural
policy and cultural nationalist terms to understand how content passes through (or bypasses)
dominant US and UK cultural networks to gain exposure to global English-language audiences.
What are the mechanisms by which content is brokered on the global adaptation exchange, and
what complex interplays of agents, institutions, and commerce inflect cultural evaluation aeross
different territories? What specific industry phenomena cause a rise or fall in cultural prestige for
authors, publishers, directors, or studios, for what reasons and in the eyes of which audiences?
Do adaptation industry agents always benefit symbiotically fi-om the multi-platform circulation of
content, or can a property's rise to mass-market exposure in one media sector trigger devaluation
of a property's cultural currency in another? After all, for every reader who selects a tie-in edition
on the basis of the familiar film-still reproduced on the cover, there are others who will actively
seek out the "purer," more "literary" pre-adaptation cover design (Marshall A1). To what extent
are relationships within the adaptation ecosystem mutually sustaining and to what extent do they
evidence sectoral rivalries, commercial conflicts, and long-standing prejudices about the cultural
status of specific mediums? Such issues are endlessly intellectually piquant, and unquestionably
contemporary in their relevance. Together they represent an exciting opportunity to transform
adaptation studies fi-om an intellectual niche topic into perhaps the unifying discipline at the
epicenter of contemporary communication studies.
Simone Murray
Monash University, Melbourne
Notes
' Leitch makes a similar point about the cul-de-sac status of adaptation in relation to filtn studies in the opening chapter of
his Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, stating that "until quite recently, adaptation study has stood apart from the main
currents in film theory" (3), relegated to the gap "between tiie study of literature as literature and the study of cinema as
literature" (7).
- Such remarks echo Dudley Andrew's earlier judgment that "discourse about adaptation" is "frequently the most narrow
and provincial area of film theory." However, Andrew completes his sentence with the more optimistic observation that
adaptation "is potentially as far-reaching as you like"a view of the field's potential that this article shares (28).
' Refer Fred H. Marcus, ed.. Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media (Scranton: Chandler, 1971); Geoffrey Wagner, The
Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1975); Morris Beja, Film and Literature: An Intmduction (New
York: Longman, 1979); Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, eds.. The English Novel and the Movies (New York: Ungar, 1981);
Stuart Y. McDougal, Made into Movies: From Literature to Film (New York: Holt, 1985); John Orr and Colin Nicholson, eds..
Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting. 1950-1990 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992); Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film:
An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); John M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes, Adaptation:
Studying Film and Literature (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006).
'' Refer Fred H. Marcus, ed.. Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media (Scranton: Chandler, 1971); Geoflfrey Wagner, Tlie
Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1975); Morris Beja, Film and Literature: An Introduction (New
York: Longman, 1979); Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979);
Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, eds.. The English Novel and the Movies (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981); John Orr and
Colin Nicholson, eds.. Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950-1990 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992); Brian
McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Robert Stam, Literature
through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Maiden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Robert Stam and Alessandra
Raengo, eds.. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Maiden: Blackwell, 2005); Robert Stam
and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (Maiden: Blackwell, 2005).
' Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation and Ixitch's Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The
Passion of the Christ are welcome recent exceptions to this general rule; both explicitly lament the currently fragmented
nature of most adaptations research. Hutcheon diplomatically praises selected case-study-based volumes, while regretting
that "such individual readings [...] rarely offer [...] generalizable insights into theoretical issues" (xiii). Despite the title of
Leitch's work, which appears to herald a collection of adaptation case-studies, his volume is in fact "a study not so much of
16/Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry
"specific adaptations as of specific problems adaptations raise" (20), Neither of these monographs are primarily materialist,
however, in their proposed interventions in the discipline, making both books complementary rather than identical to the new
research directions proposed in the current article,
' Cartmell and Whelehan (The Cambridge Companion) have recently called for adaptation studies to pay attention to the
"commercial considerations [,,,] [of] the film and television industries" ifi order to better understand the production contexts
out of which adaptations emerge (4,9), But, curiously, they exempt the book publishing industry firom similar scrutiny. For
an extended case-study example of how such an industrially focused research methodology might analyze adaptation, taking
into account both the book and screen industries, refer Murray ("Phantom Adaptations" 8),
' Bluestone reiterates this analogy of the novel as raw material later in chapter 1: "What happens [,,,] when the filmiest
undertakes the adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts
is a kind of paraphi^ase of the novelthe novel viewed as raw material" (62),
' The tenacity of fidelity critique within film reviewing is exemplified by even intemationally respected film critic David
Stratton having recourse to the trope in his recent review of Ryan Murphy's film adaptation (2006) of Augusten Burroughs'
memoir Running with Scissors (2002): "the faithful filming of a book is virtually an impossibility, and the film version has, of
necessity, to be something different. The question to ask seems to be this: Is [sic] the film faithful to the spirit, to the essence,
of the book" (22),
' Kamilla Elliott also incorporates much semiotic and formalist analysis into her recent study of adaptation, although her
work historicizes "interart" debates and cross-pollinates this earlier semiotic tradition with analytical techniques derived from
postmodernism and cultural studies (5),
'"That cross-media transfer of content need not necessarily presuppose a textual analysis methodology is demonstrated by
a recent wave of research into the material and institutional conditions of rights-trading and cross-promotion between book
publishing and the mediums of theatre, radio, and film in the first decades of the twentieth century (refer Weedon, "From
Three-Deckers," "Elinor Glyn's"; Hammond; Adam),
' ' There appears to be something about the glacial pace of theoretical innovation in adaptation studies that causes critics to
vent their frustration in enumerated lists of "cliches," "truisms," or "fallacies" currently plaguing the field (refer Larsson 70;
Leitch, 'Twelve Fallacies" 149; Hutcheon, A Theory 52-71),
'^ Cited approvingly by Whelehan (6),
" Refer, for example, Reynolds (16),
'" There are a handful of notable exceptions to this general view emerging from the niche adaptation studies sub-field
of novelizations: e,g, Baetens, The subtitle of Baetens's chapter, "Novelization, the Hidden Continent," aptly captures the
currently hyper-marginalized nature of research into novelizations,
" Many critics have similarly noted film adaptations' role in driving increased demand for the original novel: Orr (1); Izod
(97,103); Reynolds (4; 10); Whelehan (18) and Hutcheon {A Theory 90),
" A notable exception to this general rule is John Orr, whose "Introduction: Proust, the movie" observes that (then)
contemporary literary novelists such as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, John Fowles, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, and
Angela Carter were having their work adapted for highly accomplished films (4-5), Orr suggests that, in a feedback effect,
these critically praised film adaptations in tum enhanced the literary reputation of the novelist,
" Many critics have noted the role of screen adaptations of Austen's works in popularizing and expanding readerships for
her novels (for example, Lupack; Stem; Aragay and Lopez; Troost),
'*This would seem to echo Dudley Andrew's statement that "it is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological tum"
(35), However, in the section of Andrew's much-reproduced chapter that follows his bold opening statement, it becomes
clear that Andrew understands "the sociology of adaptation" as concemed with waves of artistic influence between fiction
and cinema: "we need to study the films themselves as acts of discourse" (37), Hence Andrew's conception of "sociology" is
still exclusively textual, bypassing the issues of production, commerce, and institutional interdependence that this discussion
associates with the term,
" "The huge growth over the last few years in what could be called the adaptation industry makes this a cultural phenomenon
that cannot be ignored" (Reynolds 11),
^ The Booker Prize was established in 1969, and became the Man Booker Prize in 2002 with a change of sponsor. Refer:
<http://www,themanbookerprize,com>,
" Stam and Hutcheon, both of whom trained in North American comparative literature programs, are notable exceptions to
this rule; both critics' work on adaptation references a wide variety of texts from (mostly) other European language groups, in
particular French-, Spanish-, Italian- and Portuguese-speaking cultures (refer Stam, Literature through Film 17),
Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry/17
^^ This plethora of research resources is in stark contrast to the laborious 1950s methodology Bluestone describes, involving
sourcing the shooting-script for a given film, traveling around the US to locate a cinema currently showing the film, and then
marking up the shooting-script while viewing the film to indicate scenes deleted from the film's cinema-release cut. Bluestone
then compared this "accurate and reasonably objective record" of the film version to the original novel as "a way of imposing
the shooting-script on the book" (ix).
" <http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/speccoll/booker.html>.
"<http://www.reading.ac.uk/library/special-collections/archives/lib-special-publishers.asp>.
" Jonze's dizzyingly inventive film might almost serve as an unexpected (and presumably unintentional) manifesto for a
new, industry-focused wave of adaptation studies. This is due to its satirical attention to the intermeshing motivations and
anxieties of screenwriters, authors, agents, directors, actors, producers, and scriptwriting gurus. Not surprisingly, the film has
already been extensively commented upon in recent academic adaptations work (Hutcheon, "On the Art" 108, A Theory 2,
"In Defence"; Stam, "Introduction" 1-3).
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