Theorizing Adaptation

Kamilla Elliott

Oxford University Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 9780197511176

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2020

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780197511176.001.0001

On peut lire dans Acta fabula, au sein d'un dossier critique consacré aux théories de l'adaptation, un compte rendu de cet ouvrage :

"Adapter la théorie de l'adaptation", par Jessy Neau…

Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress “the problem of theorizing adaptation” through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late sixteenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of and experimentation with the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation.

Adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under humanities theorization, the history nevertheless locates dissenting voices valorizing adaptation in every period.

Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider “the problem of theorization” for adaptation. The metatheoretical section finds that theorization and adaptation are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture—and each other—in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation’s relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship.

Keywords : adaptation, adaptation studies, adaptation history, adaptation theory, figurative rhetoric, humanities, metacriticism, interdisciplinary, intermedial.

Contents :

Introduction

Part I Theorizing Adaptation

1 Histories of Theorizing Adaptation

2 Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

3 Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

4 Theorizing Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century

Part II Adapting Theorization

Section I Retheorizing Theorization: Introduction

5 Redefining Definitions

6 Resetting Taxonomies

7 Rethinking Theoretical Principles

Section II Refiguring Theorization: Introduction

8 The Rhetoric of Theorizing Adaptation

9 Refiguring Adaptation Studies

Conclusion