Literature and Adaptation
Individual Report
AMAN KUMAR SINGH
Through this project, I got to see adaptation in three different ways:
Seen as a product, an adaptation can be seen as an extensive transposition of an original work which should be told/implicitly known to the audience. This can involve a shift of medium (written word to performance, or a change of frame and therefore context: e.g. telling the same story through the looking glass of a different culture), which can create a different interpretation.
Seen as a process of creation, the act of adaptation can be said to be appropriation, as it involves both re-interpretation and then re-creation.
Seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation can be a linked text: audience experiences adaptations as palimpsests through their memory of other works that resonate through repetition (with some variation of-course). Hence I learnt, we should also think of them as palimpsests over the “original” text. Because if the audience knows that original text, then they always feel its presence shadowing the one they are experiencing directly at the stage.
Still, some more things came to my mind during this work:
I had already seen that adaptation is a both a process and product of recasting and transformation. I had many contemporary popular culture examples. But what precisely is “recasted” and “transformed”, was unclear to me. In other words, given a source text, what gets adapted? I had an idea of “spirit” of an art form, which seemed to be crossing over to the adaptation. Sometimes it seemed to be just style of presentation. I learnt that the expression of idea and the idea itself can be separated; one can be carried forward, the other can be changed. Now that I have adapted a text, I am able to distinguish between these. This also led me to observe that, if we consider the story as the common denominator between the source and the adaptation, then the adaptation has to deal with the story in different modes
AMAN KUMAR SINGH
Through this project, I got to see adaptation in three different ways:
Seen as a product, an adaptation can be seen as an extensive transposition of an original work which should be told/implicitly known to the audience. This can involve a shift of medium (written word to performance, or a change of frame and therefore context: e.g. telling the same story through the looking glass of a different culture), which can create a different interpretation.
Seen as a process of creation, the act of adaptation can be said to be appropriation, as it involves both re-interpretation and then re-creation.
Seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation can be a linked text: audience experiences adaptations as palimpsests through their memory of other works that resonate through repetition (with some variation of-course). Hence I learnt, we should also think of them as palimpsests over the “original” text. Because if the audience knows that original text, then they always feel its presence shadowing the one they are experiencing directly at the stage.
Still, some more things came to my mind during this work:
I had already seen that adaptation is a both a process and product of recasting and transformation. I had many contemporary popular culture examples. But what precisely is “recasted” and “transformed”, was unclear to me. In other words, given a source text, what gets adapted? I had an idea of “spirit” of an art form, which seemed to be crossing over to the adaptation. Sometimes it seemed to be just style of presentation. I learnt that the expression of idea and the idea itself can be separated; one can be carried forward, the other can be changed. Now that I have adapted a text, I am able to distinguish between these. This also led me to observe that, if we consider the story as the common denominator between the source and the adaptation, then the adaptation has to deal with the story in different modes