THE THEME OF CULTURAL ADAPTATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY, LITERATURE AND FILM: Cases When the Discourse Changed

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Pages:584
ISBN:0-7734-3876-9
978-0-7734-3876-7
Price:$319.95 + shipping
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This anthology covers new ground in the field of adaptation studies, specifically, as a branch of American Studies that not only encompasses literature and visual media, but also a wide-range of subject areas including, but not limited to, history, political science and cultural/ethnic studies. By looking at adaptation specifically in relation to the United States, the book investigates a variety of culturally and historically transformative strategies, as well showing how the process of adaptation has been influenced by social, ideological and political factors both inside and outside the United States.

Reviews

“The book is cutting-edge in this very sense, of entertaining an expansive, protean, transformational and transtextual understanding of adaptation which places it at the very vortex of cultural creation. Thus adaptation — once thought to refer to more or less predictable evaluations of filmic adaptations of novels in terms of their supposed fidelity to the original source — within well-established almost Aristotelian protocols of concern such as plot, character, style and so forth — is redefined so as to bear relevance to the widest possible range of transtextual phenomena: novels into films, of course, but also to any process where texts generated by one medium are absorbed into and changed by another medium, in any direction, i.e. novels that are turned into films, but also films that turned into novels according to a principle of reversibility.” – Prof. Robert Stam, New York University

“The study of adaptation, long on the fringe of academia, is finally coming of age. One of the signs of this maturation is the fact that adaptation studies is beginning to outgrow its literary/cinematic and predominately British and American roots. [This work] is both a manifestation of, and a result of that growth.” – Prof. Dennis Cutchins, Brigham Young University

“. . . will appeal to scholars across a variety of fields, as well as helping to create a new agenda in the rapidly-developing field of adaptation studies.” – Prof. Richard Hand, University of Glamorgan

Table of Contents

Foreword by Robert Stam
Preface/Acknowledgements - Laurence Raw, Tanfer Emin Tunç and Gülriz Büken
Introduction - Laurence Raw and Tanfer Emin Tunç
Section I: Fresh Perspectives on Film Adaptation
1. In the Blink of a Martian Eye…Lights Out: American Horror, from Page to Airwaves to Screen - Cynthia J. Miller
2. “Let Me Rephrase That”: Autoremakes in Hollywood - Melis Behlil
3. Spandex Cinema: Conceptual and Theoretical Methods in Adapting Comic Books to Film - Benjamin Smith
4. Comic Books on Screen: Frank Miller’s and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City - Berkem Gürenci Sa?lam
5. Cryptomnesia or Cryptomancy? Subconscious Adaptations of 9/11 - Anthony Metivier
5. Bridges to a Green America: Green Romance Genres in Recent American Fiction and their Film Adaptations - Jerry Rodnitzky
Section II: Fresh Perspectives on Literary Adaptation
7. Do You Know Me Now?: Ring Lardner’s Adaptation of an American Bildungsroman - Scott Peterson
8. An Ecology of Transmutation: Ecocriticism and Adaptation in Octavia Butler’s Dawn - Andrew Plisner
9. Adapting to and in America: To Face a War, Faces in War as Rendered in Leslie M. Silko’s Ceremony and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men - Mary Farrell
10. Adapting Black (Women’s) History to the Stage: Race, Gender and Resistance in Breena Clarke’s and Glenda Dickerson’s Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show - Tanfer Emin Tunç
Section III: Artistic Adaptations
11. Europe Adapted, Europe Challenged: Abstract Expressionism and Constructing American National Identity through Painting - Justyna Wierzchowska
12. What Lies Beneath: Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954–1955) as a Mirror for the Changing Face of Postwar Patriotism - Annessa Ann Babic
13. A Return To The Context: Blues As Ethos - Özge Özbek Ak?man
14. Julie Taymor’s Musicality - Dennis Rothermel
Section IV: Ethnic/Racial Adaptations
15. The Gadugi: How the Cherokees Preserved their Traditional Village Organization through Continuous Adaptation - John K. Donaldson
16. A Contrastive View of American Racial Discourse and Identity: Constructs in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance - Charlene Taylor Evans
17. West Indian Women’s Cultural Adaptation of the American Diasporic Space - Kamille Gentles-Peart
18. Indian Stories on the Silver Screen: Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Demet Sat?lm??
Section V: Cross-Cultural Adaptations
19. Neepwaaminki/I am Learning: Education and Native Cultural Identity - Nichole S. Prescott
20. Adapting East to West: Amy Lowell as a Cultural Mediator - Elisabetta Marino
21. Perceptions Of America: Pro- And Anti-Americanism in Turkish Novels, Comics, Movies, Songs And Newspapers - Zafer Parlak
22. Towards a Pedagogy for “Adapting America” in the Language Classroom - Laurence Raw and Gonca Gültekin
23. Adapting American Literature and Culture at (and Beyond) the End of Europe: A Tale of Two Moldovas - James M. Welsh
Section VI: Historical and Political Adaptations 24. An Inconvenient Founding Father: Adapting John Adams for Popular Culture - Marianne Holdzkom
25. Aimee Semple McPherson: Adapting that “Old Time Religion” to Mainstream America - Nancy Honicker
26. “A Deadly Combination With Which We . . . [Are] Only Too Familiar”: Adapting Contemporary and Historical Discourses of Race in the Popular Literature of the Somalia Intervention - David Kieran
27. “Forget It, Jake”: Adapting American History in Chinatown - Mark Eaton
28. War of the Worlds III: The Fall of the American Empire - Angel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

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