“Adaptation Studies”: steps towards a necessary re-foundation

Abstract

Although “Adaptation Studies” appears to constitute a fully fledged disciplinary field, with a solid theoretical base resting on a well understood and precisely defined phenomenon, it has struggled to break away from its origins as “novel-to-film” or “literature-and-film” studies and suffers from incoherence between myriad theories and, more crucially, from the weakness of its conceptual underpinnings. In order for ‘adaptation’ to be taken as a foundational concept for a domain of scientific research, at least four main criteria must be met: ‘Adaptation’ must be contextualized in a much wider field of study; the various phenomena that can be marshalled under this category must be arranged in a taxonomy with a clear hierarchical structure; these phenomena must be clearly defined, and thus formally distinguished, from one another; and finally a case has to be made as to the relevance of researching “adaptation” at all. This essay sketches out a compact framework towards establishing “Adaptation Studies” as a scientifically legitimate field of inquiry, notably by developing concepts such as “operation” and using mapping techniques to envision relationships between works (creative or not) as acentered networks.