Unwritings, unscreenings
Creators: name: Mandt, Christina
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: In my dissertation, I advance the understanding of film adaptation in the context of comparative new media studies, taking part in the current debate on adaptation that has begun to reconceptualize the role of what had previously been conceived of as the source novel and its relationship with the supposedly “derivative” film adaptation. I argue that adaptation as an intermedial configuration has the potential to reflect on technologies and representational practices in and across media, revealing adaptation’s potential to illuminate how media technologies shape our knowledge and experience. I suggest that it is due to their comparative potential that adaptations are able to contribute to the selfreflexive perspectives that these literary texts already convey to readers when considered alone. Film adaptations can respond to reflections on writing in literature by reflecting on their own cinematic medium, often incorporating additional technologies such as digital screens and networks. I discuss both adaptation from literature to film and adaptation in terms of the impact of digital media on cinema, suggesting that literature and film, as well as the question of adaptation, have to be reconsidered through new media paradigms. To show adaptation’s potential to develop critical perspectives on media technologies and their discursive impact, the dissertation focuses on the topic of gender relations. The methodological endeavor of the dissertation lies in reframing adaptation studies within the larger context of cutting-edge comparative media theory that responds to the digital revolution, while integrating the study of adaptation with gender-oriented media studies in order to arrive at a timely theoretical framework focused on subjectivity. The cases of adaptation that I discuss reveal adaptation’s potential to address how media technologies and storytelling shape gender binaries. I examine Malina, Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s feminist cult novel from 1971, and its eponymous film adaptation, directed by Werner Schroeter in 1991. I then analyze correspondences between Franz Kafka’s The Trial from 1921 and David Lynch’s latest feature film, the digital video production Inland Empire from 2006, which I read as an unofficial adaptation of Kafka’s text with a female protagonist in the digital age. The literary texts that I discuss violate representational conventions in order to deal critically with gender binaries in representation. In Kafka, Bachmann, Schroeter, and Lynch, the conventions for depicting and constructing “man” and “woman” as specific roles are criticized not only by the different stories but by the ways in which the texts and films break with the very practice of traditional plot-driven storytelling. My close readings of the literary texts center on their meta-narrative poetics and their rearticulation of gender binaries. From this perspective, I revisit the films, showing how these respond to the texts with a negotiation of their own medium of cinema as it relates to both literature and digital media. I reveal instances in the texts and films that blur diegetic boundaries concomitantly with gender binaries in the course of a negotiation of their own medium. I show that Ingeborg Bachmann’s and Werner Schroeter’s Malina, reconsidered as an intermedial constellation, turns adaptation into a practice that amplifies self-reflexive poetics. My discussion of Kafka and Lynch shows how, through adaptation, a modern alienation from mythical traditions is adopted from the perspective of contemporary media innovation. Through these readings, I show adaptation’s potential to initiate a dialogue between literature, cinema, and digital networks, whereby texts are “digitized” into networks that foreshadow interfaces with which the reader/viewer can interact in ways that transcend gender binaries.