Transculturation in East Asia: literary and media adaptations, past and present

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present paper looks at adaptations in East Asia, which contrast with those of the West. Freely rewritten versions, particularly of Chinese literature, figured prominently in pre-modern times, an example being the cluster around Qu You’s New Tales of Trimming the Wick (1378). Stories from that collection evince the outward, transcultural movement of literary texts from China to Japan and Korea (and elsewhere). In our time, media adaptations have taken center stage, and a different cluster, that of TV adaptations of Kamio Yoko’s Boys over Flowers (1992-), exemplifies the clockwise, linear movement of adapted texts from Taiwan to China, and then to Korea. The two scenarios can be explicated with preference to the strategies of localization, recontextualization, and reinterpretation that are deployed, although localizing moves are primary. In particular, localization problematizes our understanding of the relationship of adaptations to the evolution of East Asianness. If biological adaptation is at the core of Darwinian evolution theories, according to which organisms undergo mutations in order to better survive, then textual adaptation means giving a text an “afterlife,” using changes to enhance accommodation to a new environment – in this case, a geographically close environment.