Adaptation and Perception: Media Convergence: Mainz 2015

Last week I attended a conference on “Adaptation, Perception, and Media Convergence” in Mainz, Germany, and gave a talk on perception and metaphor.  Although including some of the ideas – of mindfulness, mesearch and psychology – that I have explored elsewhere, I felt that something about this presentation was fundamentally wrong.  I could not explain why at the time, but I understood that I had not really put across what I wanted to say.  The talk can be accessed at http://laurenceraw.blogspot.com.tr/2015/12/adaptation-perception-metaphor.html. 

It was only this week, four days after the presentation that I began to understand what had happened.  In advocating a form of adaptation studies based on perception and self-reflection, I had gone too far in the individualistic direction, and thereby abandoned the notion of a community of purpose that I believe underpins all forms of adaptation studies.  It is all very well learning how to reflect, but we need to shape our reflections according to the communities we inhabit so that we can continue communicating – and thereby adapting to new situations.  This form of work underpins all screenplay writing in the movies, as well as in the academic field.  In advocating a move towards perception as self-reflection, I had ended up becoming dogmatic; a state of being that is quite contrary to that which adaptation studies should promote.  We need to listen to others as well as ourselves – as Jerome Bruner suggests in Making Stories (2002) – adaptation evolves out of reconciling the perpetual tensions between individual and community values.

The conference as a whole vividly illustrated the truth of this notion.  While listening to and commenting on the papers, I understood that “convergence” actually had two meanings.  It not only referred to textual issues – where media and other texts come to have shared purposes and shared meanings – but it also described the ways in which people from disparate backgrounds come together to discuss similar issues while acknowledging the presence of different ways of thinking.  Kamilla Elliott’s talk on “Add-app-Tation” vividly illustrated the first meaning of “convergence” as she showed how the creation of new apps helped to encourage a variety of approaches to Shakespeare study that did not involve close textual reading.  This did not mean that textual reading should be abandoned altogether; on the contrary Elliott showed how it could be approached in a different way through visual as well as verbal means.  Some of the apps she showed might have seemed childish to older academics; but they might prove exceptionally useful to those encountering Shakespeare for the first time.  The apps could thereby help to expand the Shakespearean community of purpose across a wider cross-section of the people.

Heiko Hecht’s presentation on the effects of furniture, lighting, and their relationship to adaptation reinforced this notion.  By presenting a series of empirical experiments conducted within his department (of psychology), he showed how notions of color and space invariably depended on perception rather than any objective standards.  Such perceptions might differ across cultures – “redness” might signify something different in the Republic of Turkey rather than Germany – but at the same time there existed a shared meaning that could be considered transcultural.  The conflict between these two values of transculturality and culture-specificity is what prompts individuals to adapt.

Rainer Emig’s piece offered some interesting points for adaptation scholars to consider.  Is there such a concept as “authorship,” or has it been superseded by “transmediality” or “convergence”?  Does adaptation studies want to be multi-disciplinary or does it aspire to become a separate discipline?  And does there need to be an accepted body of knowledge (which we might term “theory”) that separates adaptation studies from other disciplines?  As I listened to the talk, I bore in mind a statement made during a coffee break by one of the other participants: those academics who proclaim that their work is “original” or “ground-breaking” might actually be working in a spirit contrary to what Emig suggests.  If adaptation studies values convergence, then it follows that any theoretical or methodological advances within the discipline should evolve out of consultations between people.  Maybe there’s no need to go over old ground – for example, by asking “what adaptation studies is” – but maybe we need to think more carefully about how (or whether) the discipline needs to adapt theories developed in other disciplines for its own particular purposes.

This thought sprung to mind once more as I listened to Pascal Nicklas’s talk on adaptation and neuro-cognition.  He put forward a model of cognition – developed by Arthur M. Jacobs of the University of Berlin and adapted by Nicklas himself – proposing that the human brain works differently when confronted with a literary as opposed to another form of text.  While we might be prompted to ask basic questions as “what defines a literary text?” the model still goes a long way towards explaining the pleasure we might experience when rereading a literary text (as opposed to watching a literary adaptation).  Put another way, Jacobs’s model might help to justify in more empirical terms what Bruner says about the ways in which individuals learn how to adapt to different cultures and different situations.  The fact that Nicklas presented the model in such an accessible and enthusiastic manner suggested a willingness to involve the community in re-shaping individual perceptions, and thereby expand adaptation studies’ field of research.

Dan Hassler-Forest’s talk made similar points through showing different forms of video clip.  While arguing – as I had done – that adaptation creates its own forms of narrative he simultaneously suggested that such narratives converged with other narratives so as to render them comprehensible to others.  The authors of “new” narratives, so to speak, built on “old” values.

One of the most interesting side-issues that emerged from the conference was to learn about government policy as practiced in the United Kingdom, where universities are expected to make an “impact,” through initiatives that help to change (adapt?) existing policies.  Other initiatives, such as going out in to high schools and integrating with wider members of the community, are described as “outreach,” which possesses lesser value than “impact” insofar as it has no effect on government policies.  The Mainz conference had both “impact” and “outreach” in other ways; it made an “impact” in the way it brought people with different approaches to adaptation studies together and made them reflect on what they were doing, and how they could communicate better with each other.  This was something I learned through painful experience, even though it took four days to understand it.  The conference’s “outreach” consisted of integrating papers from different subject interests together – media studies, psychology, cognitive studies, literature – and showing how they might collaborate more closely with one another.  At last it seems that the discipline is beginning to move away from the literature-film-media paradigm into other areas of research.  That is not to say that everyone agrees with what’s being done (there were several “full and frank” discussions throughout the conference), but nonetheless they remain prepared to commit themselves to an ad hoc, as well as transnational community of purpose dedicated to the discipline.

I learned recently that consequent on my presentation, some colleagues believed I was not in favor of adaptation studies.  Far from it: I think its emphasis on learning, shifting perceptions and reflection (both individual as well as community) renders it one of the most exciting places to be within the academic world.  The Mainz conference admirably reinforced this belief.  For this, I’d like to thank Pascal, Dan and Sibylle, as well as all the hard-working people who helped to make this event such an intellectual eye-opener.

Adaptation, Perception, Metaphor

In the mid-1980s I studied for my MA and D.Phil. at the University of Sussex at a time when cultural materialism enjoyed a peak of popularity.  The volume Political Shakespeare edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield originated out of work done in the Renaissance Studies seminar:[i] with contributions by graduate learners and an afterword by Raymond Williams, it was hailed at the time as a landmark text dragging Shakespeare out of the liberal humanists’ clutches and planting him at the center of the contemporary political agenda.  Texts such as The Tempest offered trenchant postcolonial critiques, while stage adaptations such as the Michaels Bogdanov and Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company rendering of the histories provided insights into Britain’s (lack of) influence in the global socio-economic order.  Implacably opposed to the Thatcherite government, the cultural materialists envisaged a time when literature would occupy a central position in a politicized curriculum dedicated to creating new communities of resistance.  Anyone advocating the power of the imagination was summarily dismissed: I remember one professor branding the Renaissance scholar Frances A. Yates as “potty,” on account of her suggestion that the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabethan writing – spearheaded by Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare – referred as much to the development of psychological awareness as political consciousness.

Three decades later the theoretical wheel has turned full circle.  While politics (with a small ‘p’) continues to occupy an important place in critics’ minds, they also admit the possibility of imaginative transformation permitting artists and viewers alike to explore new constructions of being.  Recently broadcast on BBC Two Scotland (with a forthcoming repeat on BBC Four over Christmas), Lachlan Goudie’s History of Scottish Art offers a prime example.  In a program discussing Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his contemporaries, Goudie suggested that members of the so-called “Glasgow Group” embraced a transmedial view of art; they not only worked with canvas and paint but with architecture, design and handicrafts.  Through formal as well as stylistic innovations they infused their productions with an imaginative power designed to draw viewers into close artistic communication.  This process proved liberating: artists no longer felt constrained by the need for ‘relevance’ as they enjoyed a new-found freedom to experiment.  In the next program, “Long Horizons,” Goudie argued that artists of the Sixties such as Eduardo Paolozzi created surrealist collages comprised of popular cultural products designed to prompt reflection on whether the binary separating the conscious from the subconscious response needs to be rethought.  We are reminded of the capacity of the imagination to transform belief.

What bearing does this shift from politics to the imagination have on adaptation studies?  I recently encountered Dan Hassler-Forest’s and Pascal Nicklas’s edited collection The Politics of Adaptation, which boldly announces its desire to foreground “the political and ideological contexts and power relations in which artistic adaptations take place.”  They are concerned with the ways in which globalization and media convergence influence production and distribution, emphasizing “the importance of adaptation as a tool of appropriation and power negotiation in racial and postcolonial debates, as well as in terms of biopolitics and gender” (11).  Through case studies the book maps “larger ideological shifts, especially while examining the interaction between a particular text and its cultural reception” (12).  I find these statement fascinating as they appear to recycle (adapt, perhaps?) the arguments proposed by cultural materialists all those years ago.  Yet I would not thereby assume that Hassler and Nicklas are returning to the past; read in conjunction with Simone Murray’s seminal work on The Adaptation Industry (2012), we understand how the visual media has been dominated by corporate interests dictating the construction of individual adaptations for film and television.  Noam Chomsky’s recent film Requiem for the American Dream offers a chilling reminder about how our perceptions of the world have been shaped by big business.  Movies and television provide one of the principal means to accomplish this task.

On the other hand I would query whether institutions dominate individuals as much as they would like to believe.  Müge İplekçi’s Turkish novel Mount Qaf (Kafdağı) (2008, English translation 2012) follows a number of recent fictional works by showing how the individual/institutional opposition is a western construct existing primarily within the realm of the imagination.  But what if we were to cast off this belief and assume instead that we were members of an anima mundi wherein questions of life, death, belief or non-belief (binaries with their origins in the west) no longer assumed any significance?  What if we approached life as a series of moments to be enjoyed on their own terms as opportunities for adaptation so that we could enrich the lives of those around us?  This Anatolian-inspired faith in the power of the universe might be considered “romantic” by many westerners, evoking Keats, Wordsworth or philosophers such as Goethe with his notion of the weltanschauung.  Nonetheless İplekçi raises two points about adaptation studies which have been largely overlooked to date.  First, the discipline should acknowledge cultural, philosophical and ideological differences that challenge several of its most basic assumptions, especially the use of binaries (source/target text being the most obvious).  Second, adaptation studies as a discipline should concentrate exclusively on the literature-film-media studies paradigm but engage us on a daily basis.  We spend our entire existences learning how to adapt to new situations and new phenomena; until we build self-referentiality into our theoretical work, the discipline will remain on the academic margins, an adjunct to the ‘real business’ of more established fields within the humanities or social sciences.

I do not need to belabor the point about moving towards a more reflective construction of adaptation studies acknowledging the capacity of the imagination to transform the world around us.  Our focus of interest should extend to other types of text – paintings, sculptures and literary fiction not necessarily based on a specific source.  Several colleagues in Fan Studies have enthusiastically embraced this mode of analysis by showing how individual lives have been transformed by Star Wars or the Jane Austen cycle of adaptations, to give but two examples.  I believe that adaptation studies should draw on their insights while extending them into new avenues of research.  It’s not only films that redefine our perceptions – any text can possess similar transformative potential.

For this purpose, I’ve found recent theories of mindfulness extremely beneficial.  Developed by cognitive psychologists and frequently invoked as a means to combat depression, mindfulness encourages living in the moment; to observe our changing thoughts and feelings without judging them.  Rather we should value our capacity to adapt and thereby work towards a better life.  I’ve written extensively about the subject elsewhere; for the purposes of this presentation, I argue that mindfulness places perception at the center of our existences.  Our response to a text promote further adaptation as we make sense of new information or new insights (Raw, “Psychology and Adaptation,” 89-101).  We should also acknowledge the capacity of our imaginations to express the inexpressible.  This is an important point, common to all writers and spectators at cinematic or televisual transactions, which has hitherto received scant attention in adaptation studies.  Susan Sontag drew attention several years ago to our tendency to use metaphor to describe illness, or to use illnesses metaphorically to sum up adverse situations.  The use of metaphor becomes a form of shorthand, a means to stimulate unconscious associations in the interlocutor’s mind (86).  The same phenomenon also crops up in creative thinking and/or problem workshops pitched at business communities, wherein “metaphors and analogies can be really helpful to get […] something that is difficult to share with words” (“Impact Innovation”).  Metaphors do not require explanation; they possess a unique capacity to stimulate and enrich experience.[ii]

What I advocate is a model of adaptation studies that might seem superficially retrograde, flying in the face of the cultural materialist or postmodern thought that underpins existing theories by foregrounding the importance of authorial intention.  In cinematic or televisual events the viewer’s or the fan’s perception assumes equal importance as that of the director or screenwriter.  Through comparing their interpretations, we can learn a lot about how texts are consumed in a variety of socio-temporal contexts.  This model foregrounds mindful engagement: we are not solely concerned with transmediality per se but try to make sense of our shifting reactions to texts as well as those producing them.  We engage in mesearch as well as research, more accurately defined as a quest for self-knowledge through scholarship (Rees).  Metaphors provide a means to communicate the outcomes of this quest to others as well as foregrounding ourselves at the center of the creative process.  The binaries separating “artists” from “critics,” or “actors” from “spectators” no longer matter: everyone should meditate on the relationship between perception and ontology.  It is this seemingly endless process of discovery and rediscovery that renders adaptation studies so endlessly fascinating.

WORKS CITED

“Black Culture.”  Artsnight.  Dir. George Cathro.  Perf. George the Poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson.  BBC Two 30 Oct. 2015.  Television.

Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds.  Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism.  Manchester: Manchester UP., 1985.  Print.

“Dympna Callaghan.”  Syracuse University, College of Arts and Sciences: Faculty Directory.  2014.  Web. 2 Dec. 2015.

Hassler-Forest, Dan, and Pascal Nicklas, eds.  The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology.  New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015.  Print.    

The History of Scottish Art.  Dir.  Pauline Law.  Perf.  Lachlan Goudie.  BBC Scotland 2015.  Television.

“How to Express the Inexpressible.”  Impact Innovation 1 May 2014.  Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

İplekçi, Müge.  Mount Qaf.  Trans.  Nilgün Dungan.  London: Milet, 2012.  Print.

Murray, Simone.  The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation.  London and New York: Routledge, 2012.  Print.

Raw, Laurence.  “Psychology and Adaptation: The Work of Jerome Bruner.”  Linguaculture (2014):  89-101.  Print.

Rees, Emma.  “Self-Reflective Study: The Rise of ‘Mesearch.’”  THES 19 Mar 2015.  Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

Requiem for the American Dream.  Dir.  Peter D. Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, Jared P. Scott.  Perf. Noam Chomsky.  Naked City Films/ PF Pictures, 2015.  Film.

Sontag, Susan.  Illness as Metaphor.  New York: Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 1979.  Print.

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[i] At least one member of that group went on to pursue a successful academic career; now the William A. Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse, Dympna Callaghan began her career at Sussex (“Dympna Callaghan”).

[ii] According to the performance poet George the Poet, our power to create and savor mataphor lies at the heart of all individual and social change (“Black Culture”).

What is Transnationalism?

I hear a lot about transnationalism these days.  I have an essay forthcoming in a book TEACHING TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA: POLITICS AND PEDAGOGY (Routledge, 2016), which concentrates on immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race.  Further information can be found at https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138928435.

The American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT) has an event forthcoming at the end of this month on “Transnational American Studies,” that explores Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s suggestion that American Studies should expand its remit into “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods,” as well as establishing “social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads” that would enrich our understanding of America and its global impact http://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/2015-asat-conference/conference-information.  The Journal I edit for ASAT, the Journal of American Studies in Turkey, tries to perpetuate this transnational spirit through accepting a wide variety of submissions, not necessarily about “America” as a social, political or cultural construct, but which involve dialogic matters in some way, shape or form.

Yet the more I become involved in transnational studies, the more confused I become as to how to define it.  What distinguishes this mode of thinking from international or multinational studies, or even cross-national studies?  As a Brit living in Turkey editing an American Studies journal, am I a transnational?  And are the majority of papers I hear at conferences comparing one cultural construction with another really “transnational,” or simply a modified form of “intercultural studies,” a concept that enjoyed popularity in the late Nineties but which seems to have fallen into disfavor now.

It was quite by chance that I heard a speech given by Fred Gardaphė, Distinguished Professor at the John D. Calendra Italian American Institute at Queens College, New York, at the Italian American Studies conference in Naples.  Like many scholars in the field, he called for greater collaboration between scholars of different cultures – Italians as well as Americans – to reframe “American Studies” in such a way that it no longer centered on “America” but rather explored questions of shifting identity construction.  This process should be achieved not only through scholarly research but through dialogue – the kind of constructive academic work that requires us not to impose our views on others but rather listen to them.  Although Gardaphė did not describe the model in quite the same terms, he advocated listening rather than just listening; not just taking into account the words people say, but trying to decode the meaning behind them.  This is something way beyond the politics of diplomacy; it requires us to study character – not only the characters of those whom we address, but our own character as well.  We have to be prepared to shift our perspective, to allow for new learning and new insights that might strike us totally spontaneously.  In short, we have to learn openness.

Gardaphė’s arguments struck me as revelatory.  He was not just focusing on transnationalism as a series of general issues – race, politics, class, citizenship – but rather suggesting an a priori willingness to become passionate about listening to and learning from others.  This ability could pave the way for an enhanced understanding of what “transnationalism” represents to individuals and the diverse worlds they inhabit.

I subsequently traveled to São Paulo for another conference, this time on the relationship between adaptation and translation.  While there were interventions focusing exclusively on textual issues, the majority of the participants seemed far more interested in “transnationalism,” as a form of dialogic exchange.  Not only could this process be enacted through reading papers, but – perhaps more significantly – through informal exchanges.  The participants exhibited a refreshing honesty not found in most conferences (which tend to comprise a series of formal papers read out loud for the sole purposes of improving one’s academic résumé), that manifested itself in a willingness to apply the insights learned from listening to papers to their own lives.  How could listening to a paper on translating children’s literature into Portuguese, and the decisions taken by specific translators, affect the ways in which we look at the world?  Is there such a concept as cultural specificity, or is this simply an artificial construct designed to reinforce boundaries between self and other?  Such ontological questions lie at the basis of any transnational outlook.

As I listened to the papers, I began to realize that transnationalism is inseparable from transculturality and translingualism.  Until such time as we learn to dissolve the boundaries separating one subject discipline from another (which tend to be culturally determined), we will not really acquire a transnational perspective.  Likewise we should realize that dialogue between representatives of different nations and cultures does not have to take place in one language; to do so is to impose an artificial hegemony on work that actively resists hegemonic incorporation.  Rather we should be free to use whatever communicative strategies we wish; it’s important for others to understand why we use them rather than simply to understand them.  Form matters as much, if not more than content.

If this is the case, then perhaps we need to start looking for ways in which the events described at the beginning of this post can be amalgamated, thereby permitting participants to think across disciplines as well as cultures.  Only then can they acquire the breadth of openness that might pave the way for a genuinely transnational view of life.  Maybe American Studies needs to come out of its disciplinary cocoon; likewise Film Studies.

Overcoming Essentialisms

I listened today to a speech by translation studies scholar Luc van Doorslaer, rather provocatively entitled “Is There such a Thing as Turkish Translation Studies?”  This was the plenary session in a conference held at Hacettepe University, Ankara, entitled: “Extratranslation in Theory and Practice: Representation of Turkish Culture through Translation.”  I thoroughly enjoyed the speech, which rather than attempting to answer the question of whether “Turkish Translation Studies” existed, looked instead at some of the areas in which Translation Studies (hereafter termed TS) could be analyzed at the institutional as well as the linguistic level.  In the end van Doorslaer concluded quite logically that there really wasn’t anything clearly identified as “Turkish Translation Studies”; rather there existed a body of work which might be more accurately termed “Translation Studies in Turkey.”

Fair point; but as I reflected on van Doorslaer’s lecture, I wondered whether our colleagues witnessing the paper might think in the same way.  In the questioning that followed the paper, it was clear that many participants were trying to explain to him how the Republic of Turkey was essentially different in the way it approached translation, favoring an historical and/or literary approach rather than a linguistic one.  One young man insisted that it was imperative for all Turks to “engage with the past,” so as to understand their present.

I am all for the idea of using the past to engage the present, and vice versa, but I wonder why the questioner felt it necessary to use the descriptive term “all Turks.”  I was prompted to look once again at the title of this conference (“Representation of Turkish Culture”), and wonder precisely why the organizers had kept that term “culture” in the singular.  While there has certainly been movements to promote a national culture in the post-1923 era, we have to take into account the inescapable fact that there exist as many cultures in Turkish territory as there are people.  Perhaps the essentialist term offers a sense of security to its users at a time of perpetual socio-political unrest.

Or maybe not.  Looking at van Doorslaer’s lecture in light of recent work published in the Republic of Turkey in translation (as well as in other related disciplines such as education), I detect a marked reluctance to engage with personal issues; how cultures are shaped by individuals and vice versa.  There is a peculiarly distancing effect evident in the research; it is invariably written in the third person, based on qualitative or quantitative evidence backed up with extensive scholarly apparatus.  It is certainly scholarly, but tells us little about how the writers feel about their work; what it means to them.

The reason for this detachment is institutionally shaped: scholarly work can only seem “scholarly,” if it is written impersonally, in a mode as “scientific” as possible.  Through such methods any writer, irrespective of their origins, can be approached equally; they have written articles according to internationally recognized (i.e. western) standards.  This might be a laudable aim in itself but leads to the kind of essentialisms (or generalizations) that tell us little about the writers’ subject positions or the cultures they represent.  Hence it’s very difficult to formulate a transcultural perspective on the material.

This is where I think adaptation studies can really make its mark on the disciplinary agenda in the Republic of Turkey and elsewhere.  It does not need to follow TS’s lead and look at issues of institutionalization, source/target text relations, academic traditions or historical research.  Inspired by political theorists such as Weber, psychologists like Piaget, and constructivist educators such as Jerome Bruner, this nascent discipline can focus far more closely on relationships between individuals and cultures; and how “adaptation” in this sense represents a perpetual process of reshaping, as individuals learn how to socialize themselves to new cultures, and cultures are reshaped through individual contributions.  Through such approaches we can understand the interrelatedness of different disciplines; how our understanding of concepts such as “Turkish culture” depends not only on an awareness of government and/or educational policies, but how such policies are consumed at different times by different individuals.  Through adaptation studies we can perhaps understand better why essentialisms continue to be a driving force within academic life, especially in departments striving for their academic and professional survival in a financially straitened environment.  More importantly, we could learn something more about ourselves and why we continue to pursue our academic (as well as personal) research.

We have a lot to thank translation studies for – in broadening our awareness of the interrelationship between language and translation policies and how they impact our daily lives.  Van Doorslaer’s plenary speech made this perfectly clear, even though his conclusions (advocating a more pluralist view of research) flatly contradicted the agenda suggested by the conference’s title (and the questioner’s perspective).  Nonetheless I think that adaptation studies can acquire an identity of its own, provided its practitioners are prepared to free themselves from translation studies’ coattails and make a bid for autonomy.  If nothing else, van Doorslaer reminded me of the importance of fulfilling this objective, for which much thanks.

Laurence Raw

15 Oct. 2015

Adaptation, Acting and Emotional Transformation

I’ve read a thoroughly generous review of the book I co-wrote with Tony Gurr, Adaptation and Learning: New Frontiers (2013) by Dennis Cutchins, published in the latest issue of Literature/ Film Quarterly.  Describing it as “as different from any other book on adaptation studies you have ever read,” he describes how we adopted a broad conception of adaptation as “a time-honored survival and educational strategy […] a kind of master narrative for some of the most important human activities.”  On the other hand, he believes that we should have spent more time developing the connection between adaptation as a media process/product and adaptation as psychological development (or “survival skill,” as he calls it).  I’d love to have known more about why he felt that his first impression of the book “was not positive” (Literature/ Film Quarterly 43.3 (2015): 233-5).

Cutchins’s comments set me thinking; how could that connection between the two constructions of adaptation be reinforced?  We could argue that the media/process product known as adaptation represents the result of creative endeavors by several artists – actors, directors, producers, screenwriters – all of whom have exercised the power to adapt as a survival skill (if they didn’t, then they would lose their jobs).  Hence the finished product comprises a palimpsest of several adaptations, each one produced by an individual artist and all of them reshaped into a coherent whole.

Yet perhaps there is another way of addressing this issue.  I’ve just finished Edward Dwight Easty’s primer on Method Acting.  Published as long ago as 1989, it is a primer designed to introduce learners to the theory and practice of an art inspired by Konstantin Stanislavsky, and disseminated throughout American theater culture by Lee Strasberg.  Some actors positively recoiled at its theories – especially Britons brought up in a more pragmatic construction of training – but the Method has inspired many performers, notably Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and (for older readers) Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Reading through the book, I was struck by the way in which Easty insists on actors being totally involved psychologically in the creation of a role.  Until they have learned to inhabit it, and understand the characters’ motivations, then they will never give convincing characterizations.  Actors have to become sensitive to the world around them; to understand the behavior of people they encounter, both on and off the stage, as well as their own reactions, and use that experience as the raw material for their performances.  As they act, either on stage or in front of the movie camera, their performances change all the time in response to external stimuli – the other actors’ reactions, the placement of props – as well as their innermost feelings.  Hence no two performances can ever be the same.

While watching a Method actor at work on screen – for example, Brando – we can see a controlling intelligence at work.  He inhabits his characters; every moment he occupies the screen assumes significance as a means of understanding how he feels and reacts.  In a sense his performance resembles a musical score, with the “notes” suggested both by the way he speaks and moves.  In other words, we watch him adapt to different situations, in order to survive and/or negotiate them.

This experience might offer a way to answer Cutchins’s query.  Watching a finished adaptation (a media product, if you like) is seldom a dispassionate experience.  Brando, Dean or Spacey’s performances engage us at a subliminal as well as a rational level (otherwise, why should so many fans have wanted to reproduce their mannerisms off screen?).  They offer us examples of how to adapt to different situations that we can use to determine our future lives outside the theater.  The intensity of the actors’ characterizations offer us examples of adaptation in action, as well as showing how texts are transformed through use of paralinguistic as well as sonic abilities.

This experience should remind us that the art of screen adaptation is only partially to do with textual transformation.  We have to bear in mind that there are other aspects of an adaptation to consider, especially in terms of the actors’ performances.  I engaged with this issue in a recent piece on David Rabe’s Hurlyburly (1999), published in American Drama on Screen (2014), but overlooked the psychological consequences of the performances.  We can only understand precisely what processes were involved in adapting Rabe’s text to the screen, and how they were developed by the cast (including Spacey and Sean Penn), if we understand the ways in which human beings adapt to experiences.  The actor rehearses the kind of processes we engage in every day.  To sum up my argument in a phrase, we learn more about what is involved in adaptation as a psychological by watching actors adapt in a mediatic adaptation.

I realize that I might be playing with semantics here, but this kind of approach is precisely what is being employed – to great advantage, it must be said – by our colleagues in Fan Studies.  Perhaps we ought to propose future collaborations in order to share our mutual insights.

Deconstructing the Adaptation Studies Critic

I’ve just read Thomas Leitch’s very generous review of Patrick Cattrysse’s DESCRIPTIVE ADAPTATION STUDIES published in the latest issue of ADAPTATION, where he accuses the author of being prescriptive, as well as being in favor of a “science-based discipline,” suggesting, perhaps, that there might be some conclusions to which everyone, regardless of context and culture, could subscribe.  Leitch himself prefers to describe adaptation as “endlessly debatable, revisitable, [full of] adaptable questions, insights, and leaps of faith,” even though he describes Cattrysse’s work as indispensable as well as infuriating.  The review can be accessed at  http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/content/current.

I don’t want to comment on Cattrysse’s work anymore (I reviewed it for Literature/Film Quarterly and referred to it frequently in subsequent blog-posts and essays; but what does warrant further comment is his assertion that any discipline can be “science-based.”  I wonder what that term actively signifies: does it mean that it consists of a series of indisputable precepts beyond negotiation?  Or can adaptation studies be reconfigured as a series of experiments designed to prove a particular theorem?  Will we be able to divide further essays for Adaptation or Literature/Film Quarterly into sections in a fashion similar to those used in pedagogical studies, with particular sections devoted to “problem,” “literature review,” “application,” or conclusion”?

Or is the entire notion of “science-based” disciplines the invention of critics desirous to prove that what they are doing represents an important contribution to their specific discipline?  I grew up with the work of F. R. Leavis, a controversial figure of mid-twentieth century British literary criticism, who insisted on critical objectivity; any poem, or other text, could be analyzed with scientific precision, producing a series of indisputable conclusions on content and form.  This is how I learned to “do” practical criticism; by dividing my textual analyses into content and form, I could understand in minute detail precisely what the writer was trying to communicate, with a depth of knowledge denied to ordinary readers.

I’ve just finished reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s satirical novel The Time Regulation Institute.  Originally published in 1961 under the Turkish title Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, it is a wildly funny satire of bureaucracies, where legions of people spend most of their time doing nothing.  One of Tanpınar’s major concerns lies in emphasizing the difficulties of separating truth from fiction: people believe what they want to with little concern for veracity.  The hero of the novel is an illiterate with little or no self-reliance; catapulted into prominence in the Time Regulation Institute, he has a whole past invented on his behalf that transforms him into an ideal husband, Stakhanovite worker and intellectual visionary.  No one bothers to question him, even when the Institute collapses.

Tanpınar’s satire encourages us to consider precisely how and why certain discourses are perceived as authoritative in preference to others.  In the case of the novel’s hero, it is his status at the centre of the company that renders him an authoritative figure.  The fact he is manifestly unqualified for the task doesn’t really matter; in fact, it proves a positive advantage based on the principle that ignorance is bliss.  I don’t want to press the analogy too far, but it seems to me that the reason why Leavis’s (or Cattrysse’s) assertions are given credence is for a similar reason; it’s not what they are saying that’s important, but the status of the speakers themselves.  If we accept what they are saying, then perhaps we might share their status in the future.

What has this discussion got to do with adaptation studies?  Theoretically speaking, not much.  But what Cattrysse’s comment does reveal is the presence of a battleground, where critics and theorists of different disciplines are competing for recognition of the kind Leavis enjoyed half a century ago.  The stereotypical image of scholars beavering away in their ivory towers developing ideas is nothing but a myth; adaptation studies specialists – myself included – are as publicity-conscious as anyone writing in the public sphere.

But perhaps this is no bad thing.  The more scholars contribute interventions, the more possibilities emerge for theoretically informed debate – not closed debate over “scientific” principles, as Cattrysse might assume, but debate between colleagues from various disciplinary origins as to how the discipline might advance as a self-contained unit, or how adaptation studies might be used to advance other disciplines.  We need authors like Tanpınar to skewer our pretensions, and thereby understand how scholarly positions are constructed and reconstructed across cultures.  I value Cattrysse’s comment, if only to show how the critic-as-authoritative-figure is an ideological construct that needs to be debunked.

The Adaptation Scholar as Public Intellectual

Over 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the meaning and function of the intellectual in The American Scholar.  He put forth the idea of the “One Man,” by which he meant the complete person, or the person who embodies all dimensions of human potential and actuality – professor, scholar, statesperson, artist.   Emerson's intellectual, while enriched by the past, should not be bound by books. His most important activity is action; to preserve great ideas of the past, communicate them, and creates new ideas.  He is the “world's eye,” communicating his ideas to the world – not just out of obligation to his society, but out of obligation to himself.  Public action is part of being the One Man, the whole person.

One such public intellectual in our contemporary world is the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who has devoted his long career to discover the ways about how people think differently, and communicate his findings through a series of best-selling works such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985).  His recently-published autobiography On the Move – dramatized as a BBC Book of the Week and available on the IPlayer at the following link (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b062jsmz) – offers an honest account of his life, proving beyond measure how his medical and psychological researches contributed significantly to his development as a person.  The title is ambiguous: Sacks was perpetually “on the move” throughout his life, as he emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States, and indulged his passion for motor-cycling across the country.  Yet he was also mentally “on the move” through his professional researches, as well as his encounters with individual patients.  He learned how to learn – a process that is often difficult for anyone to acquire – and subsequently describe that learning process through his books.

In many ways Sacks’s books, including his autobiography, are classic works of adaptation studies, proving beyond doubt how our encounters with people (as well as texts, if we can call a patient a “test”) contribute significantly to our personality development.  We never remain the same personalities; each encounter changes us in some way.  The fact that someone like Sacks has been so ready to share that process of development through his works proves the truth of this.  Although a brilliant scholar in his own right, he has retained that humility separating the truly great from the ordinary; a desire to share his findings, as well as change his views according to the situation.  In Emersonian terms he has become “the world’s eye” through a combination of openness, resilience and empathy.

I believe that anyone involved in the practice as well as the theory of adaptation studies has the potential to emulate Sacks’s achievement.  It’s just a matter of emphasis; rather than simply concentrating on the minutiae of textual transformation, or restricting our focus to fan studies (or other aspects of the film studies umbrella), we should be prepared to acknowledge that the practice of adaptation is fundamental to our lives.  Even when we watch films, either in the cinema, on television, or online, we can develop the kind of empathy that helped someone like Sacks gain an insight into human personality.  If we can transfer that empathy into our day-to-day exchanges, in the classroom, in the office or elsewhere, then we are well on the way to learning something about how human minds work – especially our own.  Adaptation specialists should learn how to be, as well as to think; to be prepared to climb down from their scholarly ivory towers and learn how to learn through contact with everyone, not just fellow adaptation specialists.  Not only will they acquire a greater understanding of human behaviour, but they will learn how to adapt themselves to different situations; and hence rehearse what most adapters do when they are faced with the demands of adapting a text for cinematic or televisual purposes.

Many of these ideas are not new; I have referred to them in several previous blog-posts.  But I do think that we need to be able to widen our focus of attention away from the film-media-cinema nexus and learn from the examples of others in different professions.  Sacks understood this lesson well; his book Awakenings was later adapted into a successful film with Robert de Niro (1990).  If we could understand how his researches into neuroscience gave him a greater insight into the adaptive process, then perhaps we’d also acquire the breadth of knowledge that can transform us into public intellectuals as well.