introduCtion: AdAptAtion in A ConvergenCe environMent
9
With approaches that are geared towards analyzing such phenomena,
adaptation studies can shed a new light on the material and the dynamics
studied in convergence or transmedia studies, as it applies its comparative
mode of analysis to different media. One of the strengths of adaptation
studies is its eclectic mix of methods, from intertextuality and poststructuralist literary and media theory to cultural studies. These are applied to
ask questions about textual relations, mediality, authorship, authority, and
authenticity, to name only a few key concerns of pre-digital adaptation studies. However, as the various contributors to this volume show, a perspective
that looks at texts through the dual lens of transmedia and adaptation studies
does not end at rephrasing questions that have been conceptualized in
poststructuralist and intertextual approaches to adaptation studies. Rather,
the introduction of a wide range of new media, production, and reception
contexts results not only in a significant change in the material under
examination, but must – if we take media, mediality, and their different
relations to production, authorship, and audiences seriously – also alter
the way in which we study such adaptations and transmedia texts. Some
new media, for instance, are at least potentially less narratively linear, e.g.
web-based adaptations or recent video games. Other forms of adaptation,
such as fanfiction, shift the center of creation away from rights holders and
professional creators (however that term is defined and whichever gray areas
it encompasses). These agents were once the main providers and facilitators
of content and, seemingly by definition, were seen to hold the authority over
which adaptations were produced and what they looked like. To be sure,
such professionals still retain a central position, but today’s increasingly
dynamic network of production, reception, and distribution of digital or
digitalized media are transforming the playing field. This process is taking
place not in the sense of the straightforward democratization hailed in the
early stages of the internet, however, but in more complex and often more
contradictory ways. Moreover, shifts in the global economy on the one hand
and the easier connectability between media, on the other, facilitate the
rise of new connected textual corpuses on the side of rights holders and
licensors and, on the side of consumers, different relations to these texts
become possible that open up the potential for new (creative) interactions.
By the same token, remixes and mashups, new forms of parodies and
rewritings, and many other offshoots of this digitally networked dynamic
can productively be conceptualized as adaptations. Many of these are
textual stability, fidelity, and authorial control even in the case of comparatively straightforward
adaptations from, say, novel to film.
9
With approaches that are geared towards analyzing such phenomena,
adaptation studies can shed a new light on the material and the dynamics
studied in convergence or transmedia studies, as it applies its comparative
mode of analysis to different media. One of the strengths of adaptation
studies is its eclectic mix of methods, from intertextuality and poststructuralist literary and media theory to cultural studies. These are applied to
ask questions about textual relations, mediality, authorship, authority, and
authenticity, to name only a few key concerns of pre-digital adaptation studies. However, as the various contributors to this volume show, a perspective
that looks at texts through the dual lens of transmedia and adaptation studies
does not end at rephrasing questions that have been conceptualized in
poststructuralist and intertextual approaches to adaptation studies. Rather,
the introduction of a wide range of new media, production, and reception
contexts results not only in a significant change in the material under
examination, but must – if we take media, mediality, and their different
relations to production, authorship, and audiences seriously – also alter
the way in which we study such adaptations and transmedia texts. Some
new media, for instance, are at least potentially less narratively linear, e.g.
web-based adaptations or recent video games. Other forms of adaptation,
such as fanfiction, shift the center of creation away from rights holders and
professional creators (however that term is defined and whichever gray areas
it encompasses). These agents were once the main providers and facilitators
of content and, seemingly by definition, were seen to hold the authority over
which adaptations were produced and what they looked like. To be sure,
such professionals still retain a central position, but today’s increasingly
dynamic network of production, reception, and distribution of digital or
digitalized media are transforming the playing field. This process is taking
place not in the sense of the straightforward democratization hailed in the
early stages of the internet, however, but in more complex and often more
contradictory ways. Moreover, shifts in the global economy on the one hand
and the easier connectability between media, on the other, facilitate the
rise of new connected textual corpuses on the side of rights holders and
licensors and, on the side of consumers, different relations to these texts
become possible that open up the potential for new (creative) interactions.
By the same token, remixes and mashups, new forms of parodies and
rewritings, and many other offshoots of this digitally networked dynamic
can productively be conceptualized as adaptations. Many of these are
textual stability, fidelity, and authorial control even in the case of comparatively straightforward
adaptations from, say, novel to film.