Adaptation Essay Prize Winner: Towards an Adaptation Network

Abstract

Sociological approaches to adaptation tend to forsake the kind of comparative textual analysis that long defined the field of adaptation study in favour of attention to the industrial frameworks in which adaptations come to be. This essay argues that comparative textual analysis actually plays a major role in determining how, when, and where adaptations come to be. Taking two unproduced screenplay adaptations of experimental author Ishmael Reed’s early novels as its foci, the essay encourages adaptation scholars to rethink the adaptation industry as an adaptation network more accommodating to textual effects. As a writer, Reed draws attention to the ways in which texts always exceed their contexts, industrial or otherwise. In so doing, he makes way for viral incursions into the adaptation industry—incursions that suggest that industry is, after all, everywhere inflected by aesthetics.