Beyond fidelity: The dialogics of adaptation. Add to My Bookmarks Export citation. Type Chapter Author(s) Robert Stam Date 2000 Page start 54 Page end 76 Web address. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.

The Fidelity Reflex 1When Robert Stam entitles one of his recent efforts to theorise adaptation “Beyond Fidelity,” he could be speaking for a wide range of critics (54). Indeed, as the editor of two major adaptation anthologies, he is speaking for them.

Stam’s principal objection is the covert moralising of fidelity discourse: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film” (“Introduction”, 3). 2There are problems with fidelity discourse beyond its implied moralising. For Robert B. Ray and Dudley Andrew, the problem with fidelity is that it makes for boring criticism. “Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation” (31).

Part of what makes this discussion tiresome is its unswaying commitment to the historically dubious and logically unnecessary assumption that “the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text” (Andrew, 31). Linda Hutcheon, similarly bored with fidelity discussions, highlights the same logical flaw: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (7). 3Hutcheon may be writing 25 years after Andrew, but she still has something to gain by attacking what was, until recently, “the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies” (7)—what Stam calls “the conventional language” and “the standard rhetoric” (3); what Ray calls (citing Jonathan Culler) “an endless series of twenty-page articles” (47). What she has to gain is the ability to talk about what interests her: “there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (7). This is a personal victory, not a disciplinary one (“Of more interest to me;” “I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’” [xii]). Still, it is a victory, if only on that scale.

4Andrew, by contrast, hoped his attacks on fidelity discourse would change the discipline. Driver Plotter Hp Designjet 800 Windows 7 64 Bit more. “Let us not use [adaptation] to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual artworks. Let us use it as we use all cultural practices” (37). Reviewing Andrew’s essay in 1984, Christopher Orr was more pessimistic about attempts to change adaptation studies, and blunt about his disciplinary aims: “Given the problematic nature of the discourse of fidelity, one is tempted to call for a moratorium on adaptation studies” (72).

Phpbb3 Wow Styles Download here. And looking back on Andrew and Orr, Ray agreed that harsh measures were necessary for the field, but he more or less blamed Andrew for offering a fillip to fidelity in his call for more sociologically aware studies of adaptation. “I think we more urgently need to know something else” (48). 5And yet the discipline resists. “All the various manifestations of ‘theory’ over the last decades should logically have changed this negative view of adaptation. Yet disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist” (Hutcheon, xii-xiii, citing Stam). What I am calling the fidelity reflex, though, is not the persistence of the discourse, but the persistent call for it to end. For adaptation theory to have any chance of success, it must do two things.

First, it must account for the persistence of fidelity discourse despite decades of resourceful argument against it. Second, it must account for its own blind spot: What has the campaign against fidelity failed to get? And given this consistent failure to achieve its goals, why do critics persist in calling for an end to fidelity? The Conversation of Judgment 6How could adaptation studies have resisted such an onslaught—not simply of Hutcheon, Stam, Andrew, Orr, Naremore, Ray, and McFarlane, but also of Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Barthes? (Hutcheon, 21; Stam, 8-9).

Ray’s answer is that the field of film and literature has remained in a “pre-paradigmatic state,” held there by the New Criticism’s “veneration of ‘art’.” (44-5). Coprocessor Driver For Hp Dv6000 Motherboard. The “exigencies of the academic market” have given us a mountain of case studies that fail to add up to anything. They are the tribute paid to literature by those who would institutionalise film studies; adaptation studies make film acceptable to literature departments looking to “maintain declining enrollments in the humanities” (47), while “shor[ing] up literature’s crumbling walls” (46). 7As total an explanation as this is, indeed, as damning as Ray’s indictment of the field may seem, even he finds the origin of the fidelity discourse outside the academy. It lies in our ordinary discussions of adaptations: “Without the benefit of a presiding poetics, film and literature scholars could only persist [there it is again] in asking about individual movies the same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?) getting the same unproductive answer (The book is better)” (44). For Ray, the layman’s question has poisoned academic criticism because it rests on a comparison: “Most of the articles written could have used a variation of the words in the title ‘But Compared to the Original.’” (45).