Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the manner by which definitions of adaptation draw boundaries between “adaptations” and other forms of sourced cultural and artistic production. I argue that the challenge of defining and delineating adaptation increases for works that have been adapted numerous times in a range of media and across multiple media platforms. Using The Wizard of Oz as a test case, I consider a myriad of Oz-based and Oz-inspired works within the model of a network. The adaptation network, I hold, is the aggregate of narrative moments, reference points, and iconography that comes to be associated with a particular work through successive acts of adaptation.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Davis offers a useful distinction between the text that is “fixed” in an author’s words and the culture text which reflects a cultural memory of a work shaped by adaptations, revisions, and rereadings. The author’s text is located in a particular time and place; the culture text is still being created, “Retelling A Christmas Carol: Text and Culture Text,” The American Scholar 59.1 (Winter 1990), 110.
- 2.
The metaphor of the network has gained currency in adaptation studies in recent decades. Simone Murray, for example, uses it to account for the “multidirectional” flow of adaptation, noting that “any node in the network may initiate an adaptation project in any direction,” “The Business of Adaptation: Reading the Market,” in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 124. Presumably Murray’s model would include various textual and aesthetic iterations, however her primary concern lies with the industry agents responsible for bringing adaptations into being, and not the myriad permutations of a given work. Kyle Meikle expands Murray’s concept of the network to include textual networks in his analysis of two of Ishmael Reed’s unproduced screenplay adaptations, asserting that they do not represent “failed films or symptoms thereof,” but are “nodes in an adaptation network, texts in and of themselves,” “Towards an Adaptation Network,” Adaptation 6.3 (Sept. 2013): 262. My own use of the metaphor places greater emphasis on reiterative practices of textual networks and the contributions of individual modes of adaptation to those networks.
- 3.
While an assumption has been that teachers use adaptations in place of literary works to the detriment of students’ education, recent essay collections highlight the myriad, fruitful uses of adaptation in the literature classroom. See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Teaching Adaptations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh, eds. The Pedagogy of Adaptation (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010).
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Newell, K. (2017). Introduction: Not in Kansas Anymore: Adaptation Networks. In: Expanding Adaptation Networks. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56712-3_1
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