While reading this week, what particularly struck me was the
vast similarities and key points being made about stories in general that
relate directly to my English 3110 class, called Stories and Storytelling. In
this text, Hutcheon states, “seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a
form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works
that resonate through repetition with variation”, bringing about the point we
have made in my other class how stories are essentially an endless circle of
repetition. Fairly recently, science has proven that our minds process
information through the form of narrative, and has displayed the power of
stories themselves – and in this discovery has uncovered how all of the stories
that we hear in our lifetime are already inside of us – we just have to
experience them to process them as actual stories. In relation to this,
adaptations are just versions of the stories we have already heard, simply
portrayed in someone else’s experience
of them. I find this interesting because as we view and study an adaptation of
a novel, film, or other piece of work, we end up discovering more about the
creator of the adaptation when new perspectives and “understandings” of the
original work is displayed. So, as Hutcheon states, adaptations are second
without being secondary, a derivation that is not derivative – they are
complex, unique pieces of work, but also, an extension of an idea many people
may already have inside of them. Surely, then, one cannot base a critique of
such simply off of its fidelity to the original work. They are, in their own
respect, worthy of analysis besides this point.
Questions: How does one determine what is the most proper
form of an adaptation from an original work? If money were not such a common
motive, would there be less adaptations in this world today, or more?
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