When Where Adaptation

Hutcheon writes well but her chapters have been hard to process because she gives so much information. I feel like a lot of the chapter could be cut down to be more concise. I say this because I read the whole chapter and feel like I missed the point.

Anyways I did take away some things from this reading. The overall point the author was making as I saw it was the way that adaptations change based on time and place. Meaning that when a story is adapted, parts of it will most likely be changed to reflect the culture that the adaptation takes place in. I believe she refers to this as 'context of creation and reception'. This makes sense because a story uses cultural settings as tools to tell a story, and in a different culture or time these storytelling tools, (cultural settings) may not make sense to an audience and so have to be rewritten simply to tell the story efficiently.

The author uses the story Carmen as an example of a story that has been adapted many times in many different places over the years. With each version some details of the story is changed to be able to relate better with the audience. Carmen is about a free spirited gypsy woman who falls in love and is murdered by her lover. (I think.) It takes place in Spain in the 1800's. So the core of the story is about the woman Carmen and her role in society and the romantic relationships. Apparently it is a good enough story to warrant retellings and adaptations. When someone goes to adapt Carmen for modern American audiences, it makes sense to change the settings and details of the story to something more relatable to the audience so that they can focus on the core of the story that matters. If they remade the original story the American audience would distracted/interested by the Spanish cultural differences and settings which would detract from the point of the story. Basically settings and props are supposed to support the story and not distract from it. They need to be changed to reflect the audience's understanding so they don't get in the way of the actual story.