Histories of Theorizing Adaptation

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Chapter 1 surveys prior histories of theorizing adaptation and the neglect of history in adaptation studies. In spite of being charged with theoretical lack, the field of adaptation studies has tended to prioritize theory over history. History offers a perspective that theorization, often ahistorical in its claims, lacks. Many scholars substitute a myth of fidelity for an actual history of theorizing adaptation; the histories that we do have tend to begin with the birth of film and figure the history of theorizing adaptation as a progress toward greater truth. This history, which reaches beyond literary film adaptation to other media and farther back to the sixteenth century, finds that adaptation theorization has not unfolded as a linear progress but has regularly engaged in processes of theoretical repetition and return, together with variation and progressivism. In so doing, a history of theorization resembles adaptation itself as a process of repetition with variation.

Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.


Author(s):  
Gareth D. Williams

Chapter 2 builds on the mnemonic significance of the Etna Idea as traced in Chapter 1, partly by relating Pietro Bembo’s activation of literary memory on Etna to the Classical phenomenon of mnemonic topography, or the embedding of the socio-historical, cultural, and literary past into descriptions of material landscape. De Aetna is also viewed in Chapter 2 in relation to the Renaissance tradition of travel writings that combined topographical surveillance with the visitation of antiquity in merging past and present, or in connecting place description with antiquarian recovery. A further memory function of De Aetna lies in its possible dialogue with, and even its direct response to, Petrarch’s celebrated account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. The chapter duly visits that account, but as part of a larger attempt to locate Pietro’s Etna adventure within the broader history of mountaineering and the mixed attitudes to mountains from antiquity to the sixteenth century.


Author(s):  
Elena A. Schneider

Chapter 1 gives a history of British expansion into Caribbean waters claimed by Spain and developing conflict over commercial access to and political control over the island of Cuba. A deep-seated obsession with capturing Havana developed as early as the sixteenth century, during these years of English and later British advance. In the early eighteenth century, the British-dominated slave trade to Spanish America and the contraband traffic that accompanied it led to conflicts with Spain that precipitated a cycle of wars. The Spanish monarchy sought exclusive political and commercial control over its overseas territories, yet, to its dismay, the local dynamics of these wars led to even more regional autonomy and integration for its overseas possessions. Through a cycle of eighteenth-century wars targeting Spanish America, British subjects developed closer commercial ties with Havana, and British commanders gained better knowledge of how to attack the city with each failed attempt.


Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

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.


Sweet Thing ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 29-79
Author(s):  
Nicholas Stoia

The roots of the “Sweet Thing” scheme reach back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England. One of the main branches of this lineage crosses the Atlantic as a penitent broadside ballad castigating Captain William Kidd, a pirate sent to the gallows in London in 1701. Chapter 1 concerns the history of this branch: the long journey of a stanzaic structure from ancient Scottish popular song through English broadside balladry, from the transatlantic broadside “Captain Kidd” through the fervent folk hymnody of the Great Awakening, and from nineteenth-century popular song and urban revivalism to twentieth-century gospel music. Throughout this span, the distinctive rhythmic and textual attributes of the form are apparent in all of the genres that it crosses. In both broadsides and folk hymns we can observe or reconstruct certain melodic characteristics that accompany the form, and in the folk hymns we can also see some general harmonic attributes.


2020 ◽  
pp. 15-64
Author(s):  
Simon Mills

Chapter 1 sets out the institutional history of the Levant Company in London and Aleppo. It argues that the infrastructures developed from the late sixteenth century to facilitate trade – the legal protection provided by the capitulations, regular shipping routes, systems of postal communication – laid the foundations for a ‘literarum commercium’, a commerce of letters, that would have implications beyond the immediate mercantile concerns of the Levant Company. New opportunities for scholarly inquiry were augmented by the growth of the English community, or ‘factory’, in Aleppo, and, in particular, by the appointment, from the early seventeenth century, of a line of clergymen employed to minister to the expatriate merchants and consular staff. Drawing on the Levant Company archive, the chapter paints a detailed picture of this small outpost, positioning it alongside the more established Venetian and French (and later Dutch) communities and the various Roman Catholic missions then stationed in Aleppo. The chaplains came to serve as the crucial link between Syria, London, and the English universities (predominantly Oxford), with whose members many of them remained in touch from abroad. The chapter also provides an overview of intellectual developments which sets the scene for the more detailed investigations of individual projects explored in the remainder of the book.


2018 ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
T P. Lonngren

After a short summary of the story behind K. Hamsun’s play In the Grip of Life [Livet i Vold], its plot and stage history in Russia, the article proceeds to tell about an unknown film script. Cinematic adaptations of Hamsun’s books have always dominated Norwegian literature, while none of his dramatic pieces have made it to the screen. However, a film script was uncovered, an adaptation of In the Grip of Life: a play specially written for a Russian theatre. The script was found in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, among the documents of Evgeny Sergeevich Khokhlov. Based on the history of filmmaking and relevant filmography, Khokhlov’s film script is not just the only attempt at film adaptation of a Hamsun play, but the first ever project based on a theatrical play in Russian cinematic history. Written almost 100 years ago, the script is far from perfect in the modern understanding of filmmaking; nonetheless, it has certain merits in the eyes of contemporaries. The very attempt to interpret the play by means of a nascent artistic genre may be considered a proof of its relevance to Russian audiences at the time.


Author(s):  
Михаил Андреевич Вишняк

Вниманию русскоязычного читателя предлагается первая часть перевода с новогреческого на русский язык книги Ὁ Θεολογικός Διάλογος Ὀρθοδόξων καί Ἀντιχαλκηδονίων (παρελθόν - παρόν - μέλλον): Μία ἁγιορειτική συμβολή. Ἅγιον Ὄρος: Ἱερά Μονή Ὁσίου Γρηγορίου, 2018 (841 σ.). Это издание посвящено богословскому диалогу между Православной Церковью и антихалкидонитами и включает в себя все тексты соответствующей тематики, составленные на Святой Горе Афон в период 1991-2015 гг. Настоящая публикация включает перевод предисловия архим. Христофора, игумена монастыря Григориат, и части введения (гл. 1, пп. 1-3). Перевод снабжён также предисловием переводчика, в котором кратко изложена история богословского диалога, цель издания и его перевода на русский язык, которая заключается в содействии плодотворному и согласному со Священным Преданием воссоединению антихалкидонитов с Церковью. The Russian-speaking reader is presented with the first part of the translation into Russian from the modern Greek of the book Ὁ Θεολογικός Διάλογος Ὀρθοδόξων καί Ἀντιχαλκηδονίων (παρελθόν - παρόν - μέλλον): Μία ἁγιορειτική συμβολή. Ἅγιον Ὄρος: Ἱερά Μονή Ὁσίου Γρηγορίου, 2018 (841 p.). This edition is devoted to the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the non-Chalcedonians and includes all texts of the relevant topics, published on the Holy Mount Athos in the period 1991-2015. This publication includes a translation of the Prologue of archim. Christophoros, the abbot of the monastery of St. Gregory, and of a part of the Introduction (Chapter 1, paragraphs 1-3). The translation is also provided with a preface of the translator, which summarizes the history of the Theological Dialogue, the purpose of the publication and its translation into Russian, which is to contribute to the fruitful and consistent with the Holy Tradition reunification of the non-Chalcedonians with the Church.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-100
Author(s):  
Muhamad Ali

Studies of Islam in Southeast Asia have sought to better understand its multifacetedand complex dimensions, although one may make a generalizedcategorization of Muslim beliefs and practices based on a fundamental differencein ideologies and strategies, such as cultural and political Islam.Anna M. Gade’s Perfection Makes Practice stresses the cultural aspect ofIndonesian Muslim practices by analyzing the practices of reciting andmemorizing the Qur’an, as well as the annual competition.Muslim engagement with the Qur’an has tended to emphasize the cognitiveover the psychological dimension. Perfection Makes Practice analyzesthe role of emotion in these undertakings through a combination ofapproaches, particularly the history of religions, ethnography, psychology,and anthropology. By investigating Qur’anic practitioners in Makassar,South Sulawesi, during the 1990s, Gade argues that the perfection of theQur’an as a perceived, learned, and performed text has made and remade thepractitioners, as well as other members of the Muslim community, to renewor increase their engagement with the holy text. In this process, she suggests,moods and motivation are crucial to preserving the recited Qur’an and revitalizingthe Muslim community.In chapter 1, Gade begins with a theoretical consideration for her casestudy. Drawing from concepts that emphasize the importance of feeling andemotion in ritual and religious experience, she develops a conceptualizationof this engagement. In chapter 2, Gade explains memorization within thecontext of the self and social relations. She argues that Qur’anic memorizershave a special relationship with its style and structure, as well as with thesocial milieu. Although Qur’anic memorization is a normal practice for mostMuslims, its practitioners have learned how to memorize and recite beautifullysome or all of the Qur’an’s verses, a process that requires emotion ...


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