Phenomenal Adaptations
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
One of the major questions facing adaptation scholars today is whether adaptation represents a quintessential instance of intertextuality or just another variation thereof. This dissertation addresses that question from the perspective of perspective, asking how adaptations function or fail to function as adaptations for their audiences, depending on both the strategies of adaptation producers (who may be variously invested in audiences recognizing adaptations as such) and the tactics of adaptation consumers (who may or may not provide a return on that investment). The subsequent chapters approach adaptation from the top down and the bottom up, setting adaptation against analogous phenomena—crossovers, jokes, and genres—that invite and involve differently knowing audiences. Just as an adaptation can only function as a hypertext if its audience is familiar with its hypotext(s), so too do crossovers, jokes, and genres foreground the functional competencies of their audiences in ways that other texts do not. Such phenomena make way for a more incidental and contingent definition of adaptation, a less definite sense of adaptation as a phenomenon that may function as such one moment but not the next. They set the stage for a fuller phenomenology of adaptation, or a phenomenology proper. The conclusion considers screenwriting as a final analogue of adaptation whose own contingency suggests that philosophies of process and theories of organization, which ask who defines the definers, may prove the surest routes forward for the field of adaptation studies.
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Keywords
Adaptation studies, Audiences, Fan studies, Film adaptation, Intertextuality, New media