Adaptation Studies: The Dictionary

Course content

This class brings into narrow focus the various aesthetic processes and cultural issues at stake in adapting texts in a globalized world – responding both to the pressure of actualizing texts for a specific cultural moment and to the increasing globalization of cultures. Areas covered are questions of terminology (adaptation, transmedia storytelling, intertextuality, intermediality, remediation, translation, appropriation, re-writing, remixing, reloading, parody, pastiche), genre (fantasy, Gothic, horror, science fiction, western, crime, romcom, teen movies), canon, adapting nations, cultures and ethnicities. Rather than looking at specific case studies of adaptations (Shakespeare, Austen, the Bond franchise and various 19th-century authors are classic examples) we will consider current theories of intertextuality, intermediality, remediation, appropriation and adaptation. We will look at examples of appropriation art, montage literature and music remixing – across genres, media and both in contemporary popular culture and historical antecedents. As a practical, project-oriented, service-learning course, the class will provide hands-on insight into a project of academic publication and online publishing.