Adaptation Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.

272–275
doi:10.1093/adaptation/apv018
Advance Access publication 29 June 2015

BOOK REVIEW

Back to Basics: A Meta-Foundational Approach

to Adaptation Studies

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Patrick Cattrysse. Descriptive Adaptation Studies: Epistemological
and Methodological Issues. Antwerp: Garant, 2014. 363 pp. ISBN
9789044131291

The growing number of scholars who have expressed the need for greater theoreti-
cal, or at least terminological, consistency and rigor in the field of adaptation stud-
ies will welcome Patrick Cattrysse’s ambitious new book. Like Lawrence Venuti and
Laurence Raw, Cattrysse argues that adaptation studies stand to benefit from the exam-
ple of more systematically theorized work in translation studies. Cattrysse’s proposal for
Descriptive Adaptation Studies (DAS), as Linda Hutcheon might say, is both the same
and different, for it is founded on Gideon Toury’s highly critical version of translation
studies, which has had until now a limited impact on the Anglophone world. This is a
brave and important book, not least because, as Cattrysse repeatedly points out, he has
written it in English, not his native language, in order to help it reach the larger audi-
ence it deserves.
Borrowing from and extending his own work twenty years ago in Polysystem Theory,
Cattrysse advocates a theory based on empirical definitions (149) and Corpus-Based
Research (138), one that replaces ‘Auteurist’ with ‘trans-individualist’ creators (53), includes
‘hidden/secret’ as well as self-identified adaptations in its purview (123), and focuses on a
teleological, ‘target-oriented’ definition of adaptation (52), rather than defining adapta-
tions in terms of their relations to their putative sources. As this brief account should make
clear, it is easier to say what DAS is not than what it is. It rejects cinematic auteurism and
Romantic notions of authorship to emphasize the collective nature of film authorship and
the implication of all authorship in contingent material and historical circumstances. It is
less interested in the close reading of individual texts than in the statistical analysis of large
numbers of films—although Cattrysse contends that DAS is applicable to all adaptations
in whatever media, he sticks for the sake of convenience and economy to film adapta-
tions—and the commentary on those films, which indicates, for example, that Steve Fisher,
W. R. Burnett, Jonathan Latimer, and Jay Dratler are more important authors of sources
for film noir than Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain (258). DAS forswears deductive,
intuitive, and impressionistic approaches in its pursuit of ‘scientific validity’ (136). Because
it admits to the corpus of adaptations the vast number of unacknowledged adaptations
which ‘greatly outnumber overt adaptations’ (123), it abandons epistemological approaches
like Hutcheon’s that define a given adaptation in terms of its perception as an adaptation.
Although its explanations are based on empirical definitions, it does not simply dismiss
earlier theorists’ definitions of fidelity and adaptation as inadequate but historicizes these
terms in order to reconfigure them as subjects for study themselves.
Cattrysse’s patient, thorough exposition of DAS offers important advantages to
adaptation scholars: close attention to first principles, admirable clarity and rigor, and

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 Meta-Foundational Approach to Adaptation Studies  273

a well-informed engagement not only with earlier adaptation scholarship but also with
translation theory, linguistics, Romantic aesthetics, and classical models of authorship.
Cattrysse’s historicizing of the touchstone of fidelity is exemplary. So is his more original
and far-reaching treatment of selection, which considers why some texts are repeatedly

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chosen over others as material for adaptation. Cattrysse’s analysis of recent adaptation
scholarship in the light of DAS and his claims for DAS as a more systematic alternative
methodology are so provocative that adaptation scholars around the English-speaking
world owe it to themselves to read his book.
When they do, however, they will find serious limitations, not so much in DAS itself as
in Cattrysse’s exposition of it. Cattrysse spends much more time laying out preliminary
problems and first principles for DAS than doing DAS himself. His engagement with
what an earlier generation of scholars might have called primary texts is limited to a
selective recycling of his earlier work on film noir. So the title of what Cattrysse aptly
calls this ‘meta-theoretical study of adaptations’ (341) is inaccurate, or at least incom-
plete. A more accurate title would have been Foundations of or Groundwork of or Prolegomenon
to or even A Description of Descriptive Adaptation Studies. Its subtitle is far more accurate, for
Cattrysse’s emphasis here is more directly on the epistemological and methodological
issues raised by DAS—one might even say the issues that have to be resolved before
scholars can embark on DAS—than on the practice of DAS itself. The advantage of
this approach is obvious: Cattrysse can appeal to a much wider readership that includes
not only adaptation scholars but also translation scholars, researchers in discourse analy-
sis, and like-minded readers in cultural studies. The disadvantage, at least for adapta-
tion scholars, is the challenge posed by long sections designed to explain and justify
Cattrysse’s particular spin on terms like function, explanation, prediction, perception, and equiva-
lence. Potential readers who do not share Cattrysse’s passion for terminological quiddities
are at some risk of throwing out the baby of DAS with the bathwater of Cattrysse’s
exposition. Nor has Cattrysse’s publisher done him any favour in making no provision
for an index, whose absence renders it far more difficult to return to any particular pas-
sages that pique readers’ interest.
Although his approach to adaptation is very different from Simone Murray’s, Cattrysse
shares Murray’s impatience with close reading. Interested readers who want to get his
take on particular adaptations will come away disappointed. Cattrysse’s gifts as a logician
and theorist capable of laser-sharp focus are not matched by a corresponding attentive-
ness as a reader. When he sticks to film noir, a field in which his credentials have long been
established, he misspells Erle Stanley Gardner’s name (326) and confuses Philip Marlowe
with Sam Spade (270, 284). When he reads earlier scholarship in adaptation, he repeats
the canard that George Bluestone’s seminal Novels into Film ‘judg[es] separate film adapta-
tions on the basis of their fidelity to the prestigious literary source text’ (21), even though
Bluestone is at pains to make it clear from the beginning that he is attacking, not defend-
ing, this position. Scoffing at my praise of Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation as ‘jargon-free’
(28, 42; see Leitch 250), he conflates jargon with theoretical rigor. When he concludes
that ‘whether a research program is […] jargon free or jargon riddled is irrelevant. What
matters is whether the tools are apt for the job’ (44), his point is well taken, but he over-
looks that a monograph’s ability to be comprehensively understood and its insights readily
shared are highly material to its success.
274  BOOK REVIEW

More generally, Cattrysse’s analysis is repeatedly undermined by his determination

to establish a single, unimpeachable lineage for the ideas he considers central to adap-
tation studies. He dismisses the claims of Mikhail Bakhtin’s brand of intertextuality so
important to the work of Robert Stam and, through him, so influential on recent adapta-

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tion scholarship in order to argue at length that the Russian Formalists’ contributions to
the field have been unfairly overlooked (150–53). He is so intent on crediting Polysystem
Theory with every advance worth preserving in adaptation theory that he cannot resist
noting that Kamilla Elliott’s and Simone Murray’s complaints about the unsystematic
nature of adaptation studies were anticipated by the ‘much older criticisms’ of Toury
and Cattrysse himself (99n 108) or sneering at Laurence Raw’s recent suggestion that the
skopos theory developed for translation studies may have something to offer adaptation
studies: ‘If Raw (2010) is looking for a scoop with his proposal to study adaptation in light
of skopos theory, it does not help the news value of his paper to admit that more than
two decades before, similar but more elaborate proposals were made based on Toury’s
PS theory of translation’ (38). In passages like these, Cattrysse sounds less interested in
theorizing adaptation studies than in keeping score.
In his closing pages, Cattrysse expresses the modest hope that DAS will ‘comple-
ment’ other approaches to adaptation studies (335). This seems disingenuous, since
those other approaches are accorded scant respect here. Cattrysse seems to find alter-
native approaches worthwhile precisely to the degree that they overlap or follow the
tenets of DAS, and not always then, as his ungenerous treatment of Raw indicates.
Despite his best efforts at an even-handed conclusion, the brief posture of tentative-
ness does not suit Cattrysse, who, at least when he addresses adaptation scholars,
sounds more like a drill instructor demanding that you drop and give him fifty push-
ups—or like a conscientious teacher, tried beyond endurance, who stepped out of
the classroom twenty years ago, assigning the students some classwork to do in the
meantime, and, dismayed to find on returning after a long absence that the students
have simply wasted all that time, is intent on recalling them to the earlier assignment
they lamentably ignored.
Adaptation scholars ready to sign the pledge to DAS will find in Cattrysse an intrepid,
resourceful leader who puts the discipline into the discipline of adaptation studies. Those
less committed to the cause are likely to find, despite Cattrysse’s avowed hopes, that it is
difficult to engage with DAS without swallowing it whole. In the spirit of comradeship,
however, let me try to do that now, however briefly and unsatisfyingly.
Beneath Cattrysse’s admirable proposal to consider DAS less a ‘theory’ (‘a set of
answers’) than a ‘research program’ (‘a set of questions’) (44) lies the assumption that
DAS gets to set the questions. What, for example, is the relation between ‘description and
explanation’, or between ‘description and prediction’? (336). Should researchers in adap-
tation be able to predict the appearance and characteristics of future adaptations? More
pragmatically, ‘how do personal and collective career values match or conflict with the
epistemic values of the discipline and thereby cause the discipline to progress or regress;
and what can research communities do about this?’ (339). Finally, given that ‘the respec-
tive objects of study of a meta-theoretical study of adaptations and a study of adaptations
are very different indeed’, how can adaptation scholars best address ‘the gap between
theory and practice’ in the study of adaptation? (341).
 Meta-Foundational Approach to Adaptation Studies  275

To this list of questions, all of which fall comfortably within the purview of DAS,
I would add a handful of others designed to encourage the exploration of its relation
to other approaches. I wonder what the most fruitful ways are to integrate the theory of
adaptation to which Cattrysse so assiduously attends with the study of particular adapta-

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tions he leaves to others. I wonder about the implications of organizing scholarly fields
either by the kinds of spatial models represented by the diagrams and maps Cattrysse
clearly favours or by temporal models like histories and commentaries for which his
treatment of such subjects as fidelity, selection, and scholarly inheritance provides highly
suggestive material. I wonder which model is best suited to which sorts of explanation
for which phenomena presented to which audiences. More generally, I  wonder about
the implications of considering adaptation studies either ‘a science-based discipline’ that
seeks results that can be universally validated and replicated (333)—an outcome Cattrysse
acknowledges ‘may not be every adaptation scholar’s dream’ (333)—or a field of play that
thrives on exactly the kinds of ad hoc, intuitive, endlessly debatable, revisitable, adapt-
able questions, insights, and leaps of faith that so exercise the author of this infuriating,
indispensable book.
Thomas Leitch
Department of English, University of Delaware

REFERENCES
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1957.
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Leitch, Thomas. “Review of Linda Hutcheon, A  Theory of Adaptation.” Literature/Film Quarterly 35
(2007): 250–51.
Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London:
Routledge, 2012.
Raw, Laurence. “The Skopos of a Remake: Michael Winner’s The Big Sleep (1978).” Adaptation 4.2 (2010):
199–209.
Raw, Laurence, ed. Translation, Adaptation, and Transformation. New York: Continuum, 2012.
Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the
Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Eds. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. Oxford: Blackwell,
2005: 1–52.
Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1995.
Venuti, Lawrence. “Adaptation, Translation, Critique.” Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 25–43.