Robert Stam
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-UT 707 / Class # 17342
4 points
From Adaptation To Remix: Transtextuality, Transnationality, Transmediality
This course, which should be of interest to students concerned with literature, film, popular culture, and artistic adaptation in general, will explore artistic and interpretative remix practices and adaptations. This seminar is itself a remix in that it combines two courses that I have taught previously: “Novel and Film,” and “Everything’s a Remix.” The courses have in common the fact that they deal with adaptations using various kinds of source material. A very high proportion of films made around the world have been adaptations of pre-existing works, whether plays, novels, comic books, biographies, internet games, or some other source “text.” Internet-enabled adaptations simply take adaptation to another level by vastly expanding the combinatory possibilities. While Adaptation Studies long concentrated on filmic adaptations of novels, with adaptations of plays as a minor subfield, now theorists tend to see adaptation and remix as ubiquitous in contemporary culture. And while Adaptation Studies until the 1990s saw filmic adaptations through the grid of “fidelity,” the field has moved on to speak instead of intertextuality, transtextuality, transmediality and textual. technological, industrial, social, and mediatic “convergence.” (Jenkins)
These issues are both very ancient and extremely contemporary. Before “remix” was called “remix,” it went by many other names, such as: influence, “tradition and the individual talent,” parody, pastiche, burlesque, adaptation, dialogism, the carnivalesque, collage, detournement, refunctioning, intertextuality, intermediality, and so forth. While “remix” is a recent term that evokes internet culture and especially recorded music, its roots go back to the more general phenomenon of adaptation in the arts. The course will look at adaptations of literary classics – Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Pride & Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Hour of the Star. Close analyses of passages from the literary source-texts and the film sequences based on will demonstrate the ways that a transtextual approach can illuminate both literature and film and the practice of adaptation across media. The emphasis will be on the myriad yet very distinct kinds of choices that go both into literary writing and into filmic adaptation, so as to attune students to the workings of the creative process in the arts in general. At the same time we will look at the vast progeny of these novels as their stories and styles migrate from medium to medium. After gaining a sense of the novels’ narrative and style through close readings of passages from the texts, we will look at the process by which the novels are remediated as films, cartoons, music videos, parodies, TV series, web series, mashups, stand-up sketches, recut trailers and the like, many with only a tenuous link to literary texts. In sum, the course will explore the many dimensions of the theory and practice of remix: philosophy as remix; speech genres as remix, culture as remix, avant-garde movements such as surrealism and situationism as remix, participatory culture as remix, docu-fictions as remix, and garbage aesthetics as remix. The course will be especially concerned with critical “remediations” (Bolter and Grusin) of famous literary texts, i.e. adaptations that update, criticize, remediate, and otherwise alter their source texts. Since all the media arts adapt, change, rethink, transform, and remediate pre-existing texts and arts and genres, transtextual cultural theory provides an invaluable instrument of analysis and enables an in-depth understanding of very diverse objects of study -- plays, novels, films, performance, music videos, internet mash-ups and so forth.
What all of the terms and theories and practices cited above have in common is that they refer to processes of recombining or reframing pre-existing materials to create something new. One central thinker who anticipated these ideas, already in the 1920s, was Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who like later remix analysts, disputed ideas of individual genius and orginality by articulating concepts such as dialogism, speech genres, heteroglossia, polyphony, and carnivalesque parody. Another key thinker was French narratologist Gerard Genette with his concept of “transtextuality,” defined as “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” The goal of the course is to help students understand transtextual remix both as a longstanding artistic process and as a mode of analysis. Since contemporary adaptation and remix practices are rooted in millennial traditions, the course will move constantly between past and present, between literature and film, and between the arts and the media. Finally, I will propose a methodology oriented around a series of “trans” words, beginning with Bakhtin’s “translinguistic” and Genette’s “transtextual” but also including transdisciplinary, transmediatic, transregional, and transartistic.
Prerequisite: Film Theory
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