Adaptation's Call to Revolution (NeMLA)
Philadelphia
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Adaptation, widely regarded outside the academy as a conservative practice, has been compared to biological evolution by Gary R. Bortolotti, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian Boyd. Although the evolutionary model embraced by these scholars sets itself against reviewers who continue to judge new adaptations as more or less successful copies of familiar texts, it still emphasizes continuity rather than disruption as the rule for textual and cultural adaptation.
This panel invites proposals that go further than evolutionary theorists by consider the revolutionary potential of specific adaptations from Troilus and Cressida to Hamilton and of adaptation in general. Presentations may focus on progressive adaptations of conservative texts, reparative adaptations that seek to heal those earlier texts and the audiences they have beguiled or betrayed, adaptations that challenge or critique the Eurocentric assumptions of their forebears in order to provide counter-narratives more engaging to contemporary audiences, parodic or burlesque adaptations that ridicule the texts they adapt, adaptations whose call to arms has fallen on deaf ears, or adaptation itself, conceived less in terms of an homage to a beloved source than as a provocation to a target audience, as an incitement to revolution.
Thomas Leitch