The conference will address the themes of temporality and spatiality and their relation to adaptation.
Taking as our departure point George Bluestone’s provocative comment “the novel has three tenses; the film has only one. From this follows almost everything else one can say about time in both media” (1957:48), we would like to explore how different configurations of time and space have a bearing on adaptation, understood both as a product and as a process.
While the discussion of themes of temporality and spatiality has a long tradition within adaptation studies, we would especially like to highlight two classic approaches. In Palimpsests: Literature of the Second Degree (1982), one of the foundational studies of literary adaptation, Gérard Genette uses the term “diegesis” to describe the spatio-temporal framework of literary texts and, talking about adaptation, distinguishes between “diegetic transposition” (an adaptation that changes the setting) and “pragmatic transposition” (an adaptation that modifies events and actions in the plot.) Likewise, Mihail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally “time-space”), which is a mainstay in literary studies and film studies, could also usefully be deployed in adaptation studies (cf. Collington 2010).
More recently, inspiring perspectives have been offered by Iain Robert Smith in The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2017) in which he analyses the role of globalisation and the hegemonic position of Hollywood in the cultural transmission, and by Ramon Lobato in Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (2019), which explores how the shift from traditional television to transnational streaming platforms impacts the type of content and the audience potential and expectations.
During the conference, we apply these and many other approaches to the following topics:
- Adaptation as temporal and spatial palimpsest
- Adaptation as revision / presentism in adaptation
- The past of adaptation: history and development of adaptation & adaptation studies
- The future of adaptation: new directions in adaptation studies
- Adapting the past: historical & biographical adaptations
- (Deliberate) anachronism in adaptation and appropriation
- Appropriation into new spatial and temporal contexts
- Futuristic adaptation
- Time travel motif in adaptation
- Settings, stagings, mise-en-scènes, chronotopes in adaptation
- Global and transnational adaptation: beyond Anglo-centric adaptation
- National, ethnic and cultural adaptation and appropriation