World Literature

Adaptation
Christoforus Sigit Bramaditya
Agenda
1. What is adaptation?
2. What gets adapted? How?
3. Cause of adaptation
1. What is adaptation?

• The word adaptation finds its origin in the early 17th century Latin
word adaptare which means to “fit in”.
• Merriam Webster‘s dictionary defines adaptation as ― something
that is adapted; especially: a movie, book, play etc., that is changed so
that it can be presented in another form.
• The Word origin and History section of Dictionary.com in web
describes adaptation as ―modification of a thing to suit new
conditions.
Familiarity of Adaptation
• Adaptations are everywhere nowadays  influenced by media and
technologies. (ex: bumi manusia and ex from books)
• According to 1992 statistics 85% of all Oscar-winning Best Pictures are
adaptations, 95% miniseries on TV are adaptations and 70% of them
win Emmy Awards. (ex:tv shows from novel/oscar adapted)
• Commercialized adaptations from “Page to Stage/Page to Screen” for
example operas, ballets, musicalization, films.
• The occurence of adaptations affirms Walter benjamin’s insight that
“storytelling is always the art of repeating stories”.
• The adapters use the same tools the storytellers always use:
- They actualize/concretize ideas
- They make simplifying selections but also amplify and extrapolate
- They make analogies
- They critique or show their respect, etc.
Contempt
• In both academic criticism and journalistic reviewing, contemporary popular
adaptations are most often put down as secondary, derivative, “belated, middlebrow,
or culturally inferior” (Naremore 2002b: 6).
• There are stronger and decidedly moralistic words used to attack film adaptations of
literature: “tampering,” “interference,” “violation” (listed in McFarlane 1996: 12),
“betrayal,” “deformation,” “perversion,” “infidelity,” and “desecration” (found by
Stam 2000: 54).
• The move from the literary to the filmic or televisual has even been called a move to
“a willfully inferior form of cognition” (Newman 1985: 129).
• Literature will always have axiomatic superiority over any adaptation of it because of
its seniority as an art form. But this hierarchy also involves what he calls iconophobia
(a suspicion of the visual) and logophilia (love of the word as sacred) (Stam2000: 58).
Treating Adaptations as adaptations
• To deal with adaptations as adaptations is to think of them as
inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their
adapted texts.
• If we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the
one we are experiencing directly.
Defining Adaptations
• According to Linda Hutcheon, adaptation can be seen from three
perspectives:
1. Adaptation as a formal entity or product.
2. Adaptation as a process of creation.
3. Adaptation as a process of reception.
Adaptation as a formal entity or
product
• An adaptation is an announced and
extensive transposition of a particular
work or works.
• The process may involve a change of
medium (a play to a film) or genre (an
epic to poetry), or a change of context,
where with varied point of views the
interpretations differ.
• This transposition can also include a shift
in ontology from the real to the
imaginary, from a historical account or
biography to a fictionalized narrative or
poetry.
• Example: Sister Helen Prejean’s 1994 book, Dead Man Walking: An
Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, became
first a fictionalized film (directed by Tim Robbins, 1995) and then, a
few years later, an opera (written by Terrence McNally and Jake
Heggie).
Adaptation as a process of creation
• The actof adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then
(re-)creation.
• The process of (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation sometimes
visioned as both appropriation and salvaging, depending on the
perspective.
• Example: In adapting Philip Pullman’s trilogy of novels, His Dark
Materials, from 1,300 print pages to two three-hour plays, Nicholas
Wright had to do (re-)interpretation and (re-)creation.
Adaptation as a process of reception
• Adaptation is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations as
palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate
through repetition with variation.
• Example: For the right audience, then, the novelization by Yvonne
Navarro of a film like Hellboy (2004) may echo not only with
Guillermo del Toro’s film but also with the Dark Horse Comics series
from which the latter was adapted.
• Paul Anderson’s 2002 film Resident Evil will be experienced differently
by those who have played the videogame of the same name, from
which the movie was adapted, than by those who have not.
2. What gets adapted?
1. Story/Content
• The content, much like in any other style of genre is always the ―spirit‖ of the
work.
• The spirit‖ of a work or an artist has to be sincerely captured and conveyed in
the adaptation process for it to be a successful one.
• The relocated content is created by the equivalent corresponding sign systems
ranging from its theme, actions, characters, procedures, inspirations, symbols,
perspectives, imagery and so on which mediates the story to an altogether
new appearance.
• The story becomes the central nucleus which is transposed across different
media and genre in formally different ways.
2. Themes
• The easiest story elements to see as adaptable across media and even
genres or framing contexts.
• Example: Many Romantic ballets were derived from Hans Christian
Andersen’s stories simply, some say, because of their traditional and
easily accessible themes, such as quests, magical tasks, disguise and
revelation, and innocence versus evil.
2. Characters
• characters are crucial to the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of both
narrative and performance texts because they engage receivers’
imaginations.
• Example:
3. The separate units of the story (the fabula)
• In the process of adaptation they can be transmediated or even
summarized especially in terms of their plot ordering.
• Pacing can be transformed, time compressed or expanded.
• Shifts in the focalization or point of view of the adapted story may be
altered that lead to major differences.
• Example: When David Lean wrote, directed, and edited the film version
of E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel Passage to India in 1984, he altered the
novel’s focalization on the two men, Fielding and Aziz, and their cross-
cultural interrelations.
3. Cause of Adaptation
1. Economic motives
• The reason behind this opportunistic behavior is that as media techniques like films,
cartoon productions and even operas and ballets are highly expensive art mediums and so
obviously their owners would not take a risk with such heavy budgets involved. Thus, they
look out for safe bets and effort to work upon only successful creations.
• Peter Reynolds as cited in Hutcheon stated that “by choosing a play based on an existing
text something of the risk involved in commissioning new writing for the stage could be
removed or at least moderated. If the text to be adapted was a novel, especially one
already established as popular fiction or with a place in the literary canon, a potential
audience might be supposed to already exist”
• Example: to cash upon the religious views of Indian audiences there have been filmic
copies as well as cartoon characters of much revered mythical characters like Ganesha,
Hanuman, Krishna and Bheem.
2. New forms and new meanings
• Adaptations can also have creative desire as its motivating factor.
• In this case, adaptation allows new meanings and connotations to
pour in and thus help in forwarding the original work to the newer
generation with more enjoyment and energy.
• Not only does the meaning get a reformation but the examples can
also help to display newer forms of techniques, performance or style
which can again become as a milestone in the academic area.
3. All art comes from art
• In this context, adaptation becomes one among the many other
popular creative ways like imitation, allusion or parody of deriving art
from art.
• This proves the point that historically established standard of
borrowing ideas becomes the inescapable yet valuable part of the
literature world.
• Nothing is individual or alone in literature instead every single work
finds its inspiration, references, examples, instances in an already
existing work.
4. Personal and Political reasons
Some personal reasons:
• Desire to revive an old text and then choosing an appropriate medium for adaptation.
• Personal interest to a specific work/text.
• Wants to pay tributes to great writers/playwrights.

Some political reasons:

• Stressing certain ideological values.
• “Indigenize” stories to build nationality.
• Showing political interest in specific cases like gender, postcolonialism, environtment,
etc.
Thank You!