282: Adaptation before Cinema: Textual Transactions, Narrative Extensions
1:45 PM–3:00 PM Friday, Jan 4, 2019 Hyatt Regency - Columbian
Presiders
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
Speakers
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Danielle Hart, Miami U, Oxford
Luca Zipoli, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
Angelina Del Balzo, U of California, Los Angeles
Yuki Morioka, U of Washington, Seattle
Presiders
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
Speakers
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Danielle Hart, Miami U, Oxford
Luca Zipoli, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
Angelina Del Balzo, U of California, Los Angeles
Yuki Morioka, U of Washington, Seattle
Panel Description and Format
This session features lightning talks on the intersections between adaptation studies (primarily focused on film) and pre-1900 literature and culture. Panelists show how literary and historical adaptation in contemporary popular culture is rooted in cultural, aesthetic, and professional practices that predate cinema and use adaptation to explore ways to build scholarly conversations that cross traditional periodization and national boundaries.
Session Description:
The field of adaptation studies is currently dominated by the film/literature binary.
However, adaptation thrived as a productive cultural practice long before the advent of cinema. This session features 6 lightning-talk presentations on examples and issues of pre-cinematic adaptation, followed by discussion on the intersections between those examples and our contemporary understandings of adaptation. The goal is to demonstrate the many ways that our ideas about literary and historical adaptation in popular culture are rooted in (or complicated by) cultural practices, aesthetic techniques, and professional concerns that pre-date cinema. The conversation will review scholarly conversations around the process and product of adaptation in ways that cross traditional literary periodization, genres, and national boundaries. Presenters will focus their explorations through the following lenses: Celebrity, Fandom, Forms and Genre, Translation/Adaptation, Cultural Appropriation, as well as Historical Biography and International Reception.
1. Celebrity.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky will open the discussion by asking us to consider how
adaptation has fueled and supported celebrity culture for centuries. The nineteenth
century is widely credited as the historical moment of the birth of modern celebrity, a concept tied to the rise of the professional class and its inclusion of writers, artists, and performers among its ranks. For writers to become commercially successful, they had to be adapted to reach a wide range of audiences. This presentation provides a brief sketch of how the careers of Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Lord Tennyson—as well as those of their illustrators and adapters—were deeply connected through the cultural practice of adaptation.
2. Fandom.
Danielle Hart will consider contemporary models of fandom and participatory culture by reconsidering early adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Fandoms, what Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson define as “collective entities” centered on a piece of popular media, not only encompass the fanworks being produced, but also the interactive community-experience built by fan participation. Hart argues that many of the eighteenth-century Pamela adaptations should be classified as fanworks produced in what is the first modern fandom. Pamela exploded into an international phenomenon that enticed groups of fans to come together, and authors produced texts inspired by Pamela to satiate this fanbase. Pamela fanworks were written in many different forms and genres, but this is common even with contemporary fanfiction. Situating fandom within a historical context asks us to rethink contemporary fandom, which is often ridiculed in mainstream culture. Instead, what would it mean for fandom to be regarded as a centuries-old phenomenon, rather than a recent byproduct of the internet age?
3. Forms and Genre.
Luca Zipoli will address historical questions of forms and genre, through a brief look at the intersections of poetry and opera in seventeenth-century Italy. His adaptation case study examines how cantos VI-VII of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) were adapted into the two major adaptations of the Early-baroque period: Giulio Rospigliosi’s and Michelangelo Rossi’s opera Erminia sul Giordano (1633) and Claudio Monteverdi’s Il combattimento (1624). His work on the topic shows that these operatic adaptations should be read not only as documents of reception but as forms of hermeneutics through the complex transactions across texts, genres, and medias that give texts diverse senses still valid today.
4. Translation/Adaptation.
Glenn Jellenik will discuss the ways in which “translaptation,” a combination of
translation and adaptation, functioned in Romantic-period theater and society. In the Preface to 1798 Lovers’ Vows (the English version of August von Kotzebue’s 1780 Das Kind der Liebe), Elizabeth Inchbald describes her process of translaptation: “Wholly unacquainted with the German language, a literal translation of the “Child of Love” was given to me by the manager of Covent Garden Theatre to be fitted, as my opinion should direct, for his stage … the original’s unfitness for an English stage has been replaced with manners adapted to the English rather than the German taste.” Significantly, Inchbald’s translaptation neither translates the German play nor constructs a culturally hybrid text. Rather, it works to ideologically Anglify, to the point where it completely appropriates its source. Rather than construct a British versions of foreign texts, translaptations erase the target text altogether, and in the process develop an acceptable and recognizable British Imperial identity.
5. Cultural Appropriation.
Angelina Del Balzo will discuss the ways that adaptation and the geographic locations of London’s patent and illegitimate theaters complicate notions of cultural appropriation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular theater by exploring adaptations of the Arabian Nights in pantomime and other illegitimate theater genres. The image of the “ultra-orientalist” East London theater-goer suggests a sameness between spectator and character rather than a relationship built on difference, evoking Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of adaptations “indigenizing” their source material. While many of these texts begin to show orientalist characteristics as defined by Edward Said, in contrast to the more nuanced engagement with the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the Muslim world earlier in the century, Del Balzo argues that these texts do not solely exoticize a mythical East, but also reflect the strangeness engendered by the growing diversity of London theatrical culture.
6. Historical Biography and International Reception.
Yuki Morioka will provide a look at the adaptation of historical biography in a cross-cultural context through the example of Biography of Former United States President Grant (米国前大統領格蘭氏伝倭文章), an early biography of General Grant in Japan, after he visited the country in 1879. This book was written in the style of Kusazoshi, a form that was very popular in the Edo period, where illustrations were drawn by popular Ukiyoe painters and stories were written on the corners of the drawings. The illustrations in this book about the American Civil War are very similar to Nishikie (illustrated newspapers in the Meiji period) about Japan’s Seinan War in 1877. The establishment of modern biography in Japan was usually thought to be a result of the reception of western biography and historiography. However, as shown by Grant’s Japanese biography, there is rather a complex adaption process in the late 19th century deeply related with the development of mass media in both the United States and Japan.
Session Description:
The field of adaptation studies is currently dominated by the film/literature binary.
However, adaptation thrived as a productive cultural practice long before the advent of cinema. This session features 6 lightning-talk presentations on examples and issues of pre-cinematic adaptation, followed by discussion on the intersections between those examples and our contemporary understandings of adaptation. The goal is to demonstrate the many ways that our ideas about literary and historical adaptation in popular culture are rooted in (or complicated by) cultural practices, aesthetic techniques, and professional concerns that pre-date cinema. The conversation will review scholarly conversations around the process and product of adaptation in ways that cross traditional literary periodization, genres, and national boundaries. Presenters will focus their explorations through the following lenses: Celebrity, Fandom, Forms and Genre, Translation/Adaptation, Cultural Appropriation, as well as Historical Biography and International Reception.
1. Celebrity.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky will open the discussion by asking us to consider how
adaptation has fueled and supported celebrity culture for centuries. The nineteenth
century is widely credited as the historical moment of the birth of modern celebrity, a concept tied to the rise of the professional class and its inclusion of writers, artists, and performers among its ranks. For writers to become commercially successful, they had to be adapted to reach a wide range of audiences. This presentation provides a brief sketch of how the careers of Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Lord Tennyson—as well as those of their illustrators and adapters—were deeply connected through the cultural practice of adaptation.
2. Fandom.
Danielle Hart will consider contemporary models of fandom and participatory culture by reconsidering early adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Fandoms, what Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson define as “collective entities” centered on a piece of popular media, not only encompass the fanworks being produced, but also the interactive community-experience built by fan participation. Hart argues that many of the eighteenth-century Pamela adaptations should be classified as fanworks produced in what is the first modern fandom. Pamela exploded into an international phenomenon that enticed groups of fans to come together, and authors produced texts inspired by Pamela to satiate this fanbase. Pamela fanworks were written in many different forms and genres, but this is common even with contemporary fanfiction. Situating fandom within a historical context asks us to rethink contemporary fandom, which is often ridiculed in mainstream culture. Instead, what would it mean for fandom to be regarded as a centuries-old phenomenon, rather than a recent byproduct of the internet age?
3. Forms and Genre.
Luca Zipoli will address historical questions of forms and genre, through a brief look at the intersections of poetry and opera in seventeenth-century Italy. His adaptation case study examines how cantos VI-VII of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581) were adapted into the two major adaptations of the Early-baroque period: Giulio Rospigliosi’s and Michelangelo Rossi’s opera Erminia sul Giordano (1633) and Claudio Monteverdi’s Il combattimento (1624). His work on the topic shows that these operatic adaptations should be read not only as documents of reception but as forms of hermeneutics through the complex transactions across texts, genres, and medias that give texts diverse senses still valid today.
4. Translation/Adaptation.
Glenn Jellenik will discuss the ways in which “translaptation,” a combination of
translation and adaptation, functioned in Romantic-period theater and society. In the Preface to 1798 Lovers’ Vows (the English version of August von Kotzebue’s 1780 Das Kind der Liebe), Elizabeth Inchbald describes her process of translaptation: “Wholly unacquainted with the German language, a literal translation of the “Child of Love” was given to me by the manager of Covent Garden Theatre to be fitted, as my opinion should direct, for his stage … the original’s unfitness for an English stage has been replaced with manners adapted to the English rather than the German taste.” Significantly, Inchbald’s translaptation neither translates the German play nor constructs a culturally hybrid text. Rather, it works to ideologically Anglify, to the point where it completely appropriates its source. Rather than construct a British versions of foreign texts, translaptations erase the target text altogether, and in the process develop an acceptable and recognizable British Imperial identity.
5. Cultural Appropriation.
Angelina Del Balzo will discuss the ways that adaptation and the geographic locations of London’s patent and illegitimate theaters complicate notions of cultural appropriation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular theater by exploring adaptations of the Arabian Nights in pantomime and other illegitimate theater genres. The image of the “ultra-orientalist” East London theater-goer suggests a sameness between spectator and character rather than a relationship built on difference, evoking Linda Hutcheon’s theorization of adaptations “indigenizing” their source material. While many of these texts begin to show orientalist characteristics as defined by Edward Said, in contrast to the more nuanced engagement with the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the Muslim world earlier in the century, Del Balzo argues that these texts do not solely exoticize a mythical East, but also reflect the strangeness engendered by the growing diversity of London theatrical culture.
6. Historical Biography and International Reception.
Yuki Morioka will provide a look at the adaptation of historical biography in a cross-cultural context through the example of Biography of Former United States President Grant (米国前大統領格蘭氏伝倭文章), an early biography of General Grant in Japan, after he visited the country in 1879. This book was written in the style of Kusazoshi, a form that was very popular in the Edo period, where illustrations were drawn by popular Ukiyoe painters and stories were written on the corners of the drawings. The illustrations in this book about the American Civil War are very similar to Nishikie (illustrated newspapers in the Meiji period) about Japan’s Seinan War in 1877. The establishment of modern biography in Japan was usually thought to be a result of the reception of western biography and historiography. However, as shown by Grant’s Japanese biography, there is rather a complex adaption process in the late 19th century deeply related with the development of mass media in both the United States and Japan.