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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.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Succès de Scandale: From Adultery to Adulteration.- 3. Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945): Designing for Scandal.- 4. Sweet Smell of Success: Noir adaptation "in this crudest of all possible worlds".- 5. On Incest and Adaptation: The Foundational Scandal of Cecilia Valdés.- 6. "We Need More Input!": John Hughes's Weird Science (1985) and Scandals from the Red Scare to the Twitter Mob.- 7. Adaptation and Scandal in The Goldfinch.- 8. Scandalous Dystopias: Hyping The Last of Us Part II and Cyberpunk 2077 During the Pandemic.- 9. Bowdlerizing for Dollars, or Adaptation as Political Containment.- 10. (Re-)Writing the Pain: War, Exploitation, and the Ethics of Adapting Nonfiction.- 11. Adaptation and Censorship.- 12. Cinematic Contagion: Bereullin (The Berlin File, 2013).- 13. Periphery and Process: Tracing Adaptation Through Screenplays.- 14. The Narcissistic Scandal of Adapting History.
About the author
Thomas Leitch is Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick, Jr. Chair in Writing at the University of Delaware, USA, where he teaches undergraduate courses on film and graduate courses on literary and cultural theory. His most recent books are
The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017) and
The History of American Literature on Film (2019).
Report
"The Scandal of Adaptation, edited by Thomas Leitch, offers a new and provocative critical lens through which to view the processes of adaptation ... . scandals of adaptation are not only expertly examined in this volume, but also each contributor pries open new areas of inquiry for scholars to explore other scandalous adaptations. ... this collection's novel framing of scandal alongside adaptation serves to thrust adaptation studies to the centre of the cultural conversation, where it belongs." (Erica Moulton, Adaptation, November 25, 2023)
