The essays in this volume seek to expose the scandals of adaptation. Some of them focus on specific adaptations that have been considered scandalous because they portray characters acting in ways that give scandal, because they are thought to betray the values enshrined in the texts they adapt, because their composition or reception raises scandalous possibilities those adapted texts had repressed, or because they challenge their audiences in ways those texts had never thought to do. Others consider more general questions arising from the proposition that all adaptation is a scandalous practice that confronts audiences with provocative questions about bowdlerizing, ethics, censorship, contagion, screenwriting, and history. The collection offers a challenge to the continued marginalization of adaptations and adaptation studies and an invitation to change their position by embracing rather than downplaying their ability to scandalize the institutions they affront.
Author(s): Thomas Leitch
Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 295
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction
References
Succès de Scandale: From Adultery to Adulteration
Tolstoi’s Anna
The Silver Screen’s Anna
Anna Treading the Boards
Multimedia’s Anna
References
Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945): Designing for Scandal
References
Sweet Smell of Success: Noiradaptation “in This Crudest of All Possible Worlds”
Adapting Winchell
Lehman, Lancaster, and Mackendrick as Adaptors
The Noir Adaptation of Sweet Smell and Adaptation as Noir
References
On Incest and Adaptation: The Foundational Scandal of Cecilia Valdés
Scandalous Romance
Cecilia (1982): The Revolutionary Economics of Love and Race in Cuba
The Graveyard of the Angels (1987): The Scandal of Excess
The Little Bronze Virgin (2004): Hideous Progeny Hidden No More
Adapting the Future from the Bones of the Past
References
“We Need More Input!”: John Hughes’s Weird Science (1985) and Scandals from the Red Scare to the Twitter Mob
Scandal as Adaptation and the Making of BuzzFeed Theory
Weird Science and Resistant Adaptation
References
Adaptation and Scandal in The Goldfinch
Trompe l’oeil or Still-Life: Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (1654)
Nature Morte and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013)
“The Record of an Enthusiasm”: Adapting The Goldfinch to Film
What Is It? Critical Responses to The Goldfinch(es)
“The Thing and Yet Not the Thing”: (Not-So-) Scandalous Adaptation
References
Scandalous Dystopias: Hyping The Last of Us Part II and Cyberpunk 2077 During the Pandemic
Prestige TV, Plot Spoilers, and Pandemics in The Last of Us Part II
Corporate Capitalists and Movie Stars in the Digital Dystopias of Cyberpunk 2077
Conclusion
References
Bowdlerizing for Dollars, or Adaptation as Political Containment
The Scandal of Bowdlerization: Subsisting on the Body of an Unfortunate Victim
The Scandal of Under-Reading: You Can’t Stay Neutral on a Moving Train
Averting Scandal: Bowdlerization and the Business of Politics
References
(Re-)Writing the Pain: War, Exploitation, and the Ethics of Adapting Nonfiction
Introduction: Scandal, War, and Adaptation
Scandal and the Ethics of Nonfiction
A Readerly Ethics of Adaptation
Adaptation and the Scandal of Genre
Conclusion: The Anxiety of Adaptation Studies
References
Adaptation and Censorship
References
Cinematic Contagion: Bereullin (The Berlin File, 2013)
References
Periphery and Process: Tracing Adaptation Through Screenplays
Double Indemnity
The Man Who Would Be King
Conclusions
References
The Narcissistic Scandal of Adapting History
“That to Which We Return”
Sic Semper
“Fancy … Misjoining Shapes, Wild Work Produces Oft”
References
Index
