Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory

Abstract

What could be more audacious than to argue that the study of moving images as adaptations of literary works, one of the very first shelters under which cin ema studies originally entered the academy, has been neglected? Yet that is ex actly what this essay will argue: that despite its venerable history, widespread practice, and apparent influence, adaptation theory has remained tangential to the thrust of film study because it has never been undertaken with conviction and theoretical rigor. By examining dozen interlinked fallacies that have kept adaptation theory from fulfilling its analytical promise, I hope to claim for ad aptation theory more of the power it deserves. 1. There is such thing as contemporary adaptation theory. This is the found ing fallacy of adaptation studies, and the most important reason they have been so largely ineffectual—because they have been practiced in theoretical vacuum, without the benefit of what Robert B. Ray has called a presiding po etics.1 There is, as the preceding sentence acknowledges, such thing as ad aptation studies. It is pursued in dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Literature/Film Quarterly and in classrooms across the country, from high school to graduate school, in courses with names like Dickens and Film and From Page to Screen. But this flood of study of individual adaptations pro ceeds on the whole without the support of any more general theoretical ac count of what actually happens, or what ought to happen, when group of filmmakers set out to adapt literary text. As Brian McFarlane has recently observed: In view of the nearly sixty years of writing about the adaptation of novels into film ... it is depressing to find at what limited, tentative stage the discourse has remained.2 Despite the appearance of more recent method ologies from the empiricism of Morris Beja to the neo-Aristotelianism of James Griffith, the most influential general account of cinema's relation to literature continues to be George Bluestone's tendentious Novels into Film, now nearly half century old. Bluestone's categorical and essentialist treatment of the rela tions between movies and the books they are based on neglects or begs many