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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2009
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2009
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Queer beauty: illness, illegitimacy and visibility in Dickens's Bleak House and its 2005 BBC adaptation
More LessThe visual plays a prominent role in the narrative of Charles Dickens's 1853 novel Bleak House; more specifically, a complex relationship between the visual and knowledge is integral to the identity intrigues at the core of Bleak House. This article will explore the relationship between the visual economies (Robyn Wiegman) of Dickens's novel and its 2005 BBC adaptation. More specifically, it will focus on the relationship between illness, illegitimacy and the visible; it will suggest that the visible signs of Esther's illness, as inscribed on her face, can be read as signifying an invisible condition: illegitimacy. This article will explore the ways in which this adaptation, as a neo-Victorian television drama, lends renewed visibility to issues of gender, power and legitimacy at work in Dickens's novel.
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The film-opera Aida (1953): intermediality and operatics
More LessThis article offers an intermedial analysis of the film-opera Aida (dir. Clemente Fracassi, 1953) within the context of opera adaptation in Italian cinema. Drawing on theories of intermediality developed by Wolf and Rajewsky, it adopts and applies the intermedial subcategories of medial transposition, plurimediality and intermedial reference to the study of film-operas. By comparing the film Aida with the libretto and the score of Verdi's opera, the article first considers the medial transpositions of the text as well as the music. In a second layer of analysis, it examines plurimediality and intermedial references in the film-opera in order to evaluate the integration of operatic elements into the film.
The article concludes that the film-opera Aida represents a hybrid work of art situated between opera and cinema. Instead of attempting to record the opera in a naturalistic way, Fracassi presents an opera with filmic means, also by simulating and partially recreating operatic characteristics within the film's discourse. By demonstrating that Aida indeed offers a creative and cinematographically innovative adaptation of the opera's libretto and score, the article not only re-evaluates this film-opera, but additionally highlights the usefulness of the intermedial approach for the analysis of opera adaptations.
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Contemporary utopian dreams: contemplating Staniewski's Golden Ass
By Bryce LeaseThis article contemplates Wodzimierz Staniewski's Metamorphoses as an adaptation of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. As Apuleius's text deals with a period of social and religious transition in the Roman Empire, Staniewski felt its themes were topical for modern-day Poland, where people have suffered a tragic estrangement from the ground of their being. His primary aim is to utilize the figure of the goddess Isis as a mode of establishing a consistent identity for the subject vis--vis the collective unconscious in relation to the protagonist's double transformation: humananimalhuman. My Lacanian analysis rejects this reading as an example of Jungian obscurantism that seeks to conceal the underlying utopian fantasy of unimpeded self-identity and social transparency; I argue that the unearthing of this fantasy in Staniewski's adaptation is the performance's primary insight.
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Between the cat and the devil: Adaptation Studies and Translation Studies
By John MiltonThis article approximates the areas of Adaptation Studies and Translation Studies. It examines changing paradigms in Translation Studies, proposing that Translation Studies has been losing its narrow definition of equivalence, and, following the ideas of Andr Lefevere and Maria Tymoczko, has broadened out to include the concepts of representation, transfer or transmission and transculturation. Examples are given from works that deal with translation in Asia, the translations and theories of Haroldo de Campos and my own work on classic fiction that has been adapted for mass markets.
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Adapting the adaptors: staging Davenant and Dryden's Restoration Tempest
By Tim KeenanThis article is based on a recent revival of Davenant and Dryden's The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island at the University of Hull, UK. It argues for the critical value of performance in altering perceptions of Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and discusses the application of theoretical approaches to the revival of historically distant plays.
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Reviews
Authors: Christophe Collard, Robert Shaughnessy, Jim Welsh and Alain J.E WolfDrama Translation and Theatre Practice, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Holger Klein (eds), (2004) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 518 pp., ISBN 3631507550 (pbk), 58.00
Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction, Tony Howard, (2007) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xi + 329 pp., ISBN 0521864666 (hbk), 50.00
Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity, Anthony R. Guneratne, (2008) New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 346 pp., ISBN 1403967881 (hbk), $89.95
Watching the Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's World Audiences, Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs (eds), (2008) New York, Washington, DC/Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford: Peter Lang, 297 pp., ISBN 9780820463964 (pbk), 16.50; ISBN 9780820463971 (hbk), 45
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Editorial
Authors: Richard Hand and Katja Krebs
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