The drift
Subtitle: affect, adaptation, and new perspectives on fidelity
By: John Hodgkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 161
ISBN-13: 9781623560706; 9781623562649; 9781623568986
Subjects: History and criticism; Film adaptations; Affect (Psychology); Motion pictures and literature
Description: The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity offers a new perspective on the complex interrelations between literature and cinema. It does so by articulating an 'affective turn' for adaptation studies, a field whose traditional focus has been the critical castigation of film adaptations of canonical plays or novels. Drawing on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Marco Abel,the author is able to re-conceive literary and cinematic works as textual engines generating and circulating affect, and the adaptive process as a drifting of those affective intensities from one medium to another. By conceptualizing adaptation in this manner, the work steers clear of the chimerical notion of 'fidelity' (to character, to theme, to narrative) which has anchored so many analyses of adaptive texts over the years--and the reproving language that inevitably attends it--in favor of more productive avenues of investigation: What affective work are certain literary and filmic texts performing? What can this tell us, more broadly, about the underexplored affective dimensions of literature and cinema, and the dialogic interactions between them? The Drift addresses such questions through close, careful readings which put a variety of realist, modernist, and postmodernist works into conversation with each other, among them the fiction of John Dos Passos, Don DeLillo, and Susanna Moore, the films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as recent cinematic adaptations by Jane Campion and Charles Burnett. This methodological approach, helps to elevate adaptation studies into a discourse that speaks more directly and pertinently to our fluid, hypertextual era.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 147-158) and index.
Table of contents: title: Theorizing the drift; title: Making the old words new: -Dos Passos, modernism, and the cinematic infection; title: An epidemic of seeing:; title: DeLillo, postmodernism, and fiction in the age of images; title: A dark-adapting eye:; title: Moore, Campion, and the fractured world of postmodern noir; title: Inventing Nat Turner:; title: Charles Burnett and the postmodern history film; title: Drifting on.