Resetting Taxonomies

Chapter 6 demonstrates how and why adaptation resists theorization at its second stage: the development of taxonomies. While taxonomization has been challenged as a theoretical enterprise generally, adaptation offers more particular resistance to it. As a process that crosses taxonomical borders of all kinds, adaptation is itself anti-taxonomical. Even so, examining how some scholars have sought to taxonomize adaptation and others have resisted adaptation taxonomies informs adaptation’s relationship to theorization. As with definitions, taxonomies have subjected adaptation to other disciplines and their taxonomies. While discussions of adaptation taxonomies have been largely focused on taxonomies from translation studies and narratology, adaptation has been subjected to a host of others, studied and organized by adapters, genres, nations, historical periods, media forms and technologies, and by the taxonomies of identity politics, which are rarely addressed as taxonomical systems. Moreover, disciplines are themselves taxonomies: certain disciplines (most notably philosophy, history, linguistics/rhetoric) have been accorded theorizing power in the humanities, while others have not. By contrast, adaptation inhabits all disciplines and cannot be satisfactorily theorized without input from them all. Joining scholars who have for centuries questioned the ability of rational and empirical epistemologies to theorize the arts, Chapter 6 argues for creative-critical adaptation practice as a way to generate dialogues between the theorizing and “non-theorizing” disciplines. As with definition, retheorizing adaptation theorization at the level of taxonomization is not a matter of deciding which taxonomies developed to study other things we should apply to adaptation but of taxonomizing adaptation as adaptation and of setting these in dialogue with the taxonomies we already have in adaptation studies.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 4 traces the expansion of adaptation studies to new media and new theories in the twenty-first century. By 2006, literary film adaptation studies outnumbered general literature-and-film studies, and Linda Hutcheon authoritatively opened adaptation studies beyond literature and film and beyond dyadic disciplines and theoretical camps into a pluralism of media, disciplines, and theories, although debates between pre–theoretical turn and post–theoretical turn theories have continued. They continue because new theories have not resolved the problems of old theories for adaptation, so that scholars return to older theories to try to redress them. New theories have done a great deal for adaptation, but they have also introduced new theoretical problems: so much so, that the latest debates in adaptation study no longer lie between theoretical progressivism and theoretical return but between theoretical pluralism and theoretical abandonment. Beyond specific theories and differing modes of pluralism, this debate points to theorization’s failure to theorize adaptation more generally.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

Refiguring Adaptation Studies

Chapter 9 considers how particular rhetorical figures have informed and can further inform particular theoretical problems within adaptation studies: for example, how figures of similarity can redress transtheoretical hierarchies valorizing difference over similarity, how synaesthesia can refigure medium specificity theory, and how figures of contiguity can theorize adaptation’s part/whole relations. It argues that figuration, as a relational rhetorical process, navigates far more complexly and variably between adaptation studies’ paired terms (adapted/adapting, entities/environments, repetition/variation) than theories have done, offering alternatives to aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, radical political revolutions of them, formalist and structuralist categoricity, poststructuralist deconstruction, and postmodern pastiche and pluralism. This chapter does not constrain figures such as antimetathesis, antimetabole, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and synaesthesia to particular theoretical principles but probes them to generate adaptive concepts and methodologies by which to refigure adaptation studies. Whether we believe that there is a pre-existing reality that representation expresses or that representation is constructed, or a combination of the two—whether our interests lie in aesthetics, semiotics, narratology, history, culture, politics, industry, or anything else—figuration can revivify and refigure all theoretical and disciplinary purviews and create new ways of dialoguing between them. The chapter concludes with a discussion of metalepsis and the mysteries of adaptation and how the shift from analogical to digital technologies affects adaptation’s preferred figure of analogy.

The Rhetoric of Theorizing Adaptation

“Refiguring Theorization” shifts from macroscopic historical and theoretical metacriticism to microscopic analyses of rhetoric. Theorizing adaptation has unfolded not only at the level of books, chapters, articles, and reviews but also at the level of sentences, phrases, words, and pieces of words. Analyzing relations between parts of speech governed by the laws of grammar makes clear that some problems of theorizing adaptation lie within the systems and structures of rhetoric itself. A microscopic study of rhetoric takes larger discourses to pieces not only to understand their workings but also as a prelude to constructing new discourses of theorizing adaptation. Rhetoric’s conjoined persuasive and aesthetic functions render it particularly resonant for pondering the relationship between theoretical discourses and aesthetic practices, with potential for refiguring that relationship. Figurative rhetoric (or figuration) is central to this endeavor, providing a variegated, adaptive rhetoric with potential to forge new ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about adaptation, theorization, and their relationship to each other.

Rethinking Theoretical Principles

Chapter 7 examines how and why adaptation resists theorization at its third stage: the development of theoretical principles. Unlike most discussions of adaptation in relation to theoretical principles, the purpose of this chapter is not to adjudicate which principles are truest or best for adaptation, nor to generate new principles to govern adaptation, but to probe the relationship between the principles of theorization and the principles of adaptation. The principles of what theorization is and should do in the humanities have been extensively canvassed and debated; the principles of adaptation have been rarely addressed. Chapter 7 makes a small start on redressing that imbalance. It begins by considering humanities’ theorization’s preoccupation with truth by contrast to how little adaptation has been concerned with truth. It continues by pondering why the humanities have struggled more than the social sciences and sciences to theorize adaptation and what we can learn from their less problematic relations to adaptation. The lesson from the sciences is not to become more systematic, categorical, positivist, or objectivist but to learn from them not to fear our subject matter’s challenges to our theoretical principles and to theorize more experimentally, freely, and creatively, even at the risk of failure and error. It concludes by proposing what principles of adaptation might look like and by pondering how these principles might talk back to theoretical principles and how they might reach across the diasporic field that is adaptation studies to develop it through dialogue and debate over what the principles of adaptation are and how they challenge the theoretical principles that have been levied on adaptation.

Conclusion

The Conclusion revisits and reviews the central findings of this book’s history, theory, and rhetoric of theorizing adaptation in the humanities. The history section has described and explicated adaptation’s rising, falling, and equivocal fortunes under humanities theorization. The theory section has pondered general dynamics between humanities adaptation and theorization, finding that theorization’s relationship to adaptation has been a hierarchical one that seeks to subject adaptation to its laws. Yet adaptation is a rival process akin to, and yet opposed to, theorization, one that exceeds and resists theorization’s definitions, taxonomies, principles, epistemologies, and methodologies. The rhetoric section suggests figurative rhetoric as a way of breaking out of theoretical binds, resolving theoretical impasses, and opening up new ways to think about adaptation and new methodologies to study it, as well as to develop a shared discourse that can encompass different fields, disciplines, nations, eras, theories, epistemologies, and methodologies.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.

Histories of Theorizing Adaptation

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.

Introduction

Adaptation studies in the humanities has grown exponentially as a field since 1990, and many new theories have been brought to bear on it in the twenty-first century. Even so, adaptation scholars continue to view the field as theoretically lacking. For most, the problem of theorizing adaptation is that scholars are using the “wrong” theories, a problem to be remedied by using the “right” theories, although what the “right” theories are continues to be contested, even in an age of theoretical pluralism. This introduction inaugurates the book’s investigation of how and why the ways in which theorization has been practiced in the humanities generally has been wrong for adaptation studies particularly and offers an overview of the ways in which the chapters aim to redress the dysfunctional relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities.