Guest Post: Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University) and Jeremy Strong (Writtle College)
The number of parallel sessions meant that it was impossible to get to everything that you wanted to hear. Nonetheless, it was unanimously agreed that both the number and standard of papers were high, indicating that there’s no doubt that there’s a future for this field. The conference attracted speakers and participants from an impressive range of locations and institutions across the USA, Europe, Australia and Asia; a catholicity that was matched by the spread of texts, approaches and interpretive paradigms under discussion. Certainly, members of the round table discussion were upbeat about the state of literature on screen studies in 2007. Imelda Whelehan noted that attitudes were changing and that we’ve got beyond having to rehearse all the arguments about why fidelity is no longer an indicator of merit. It was generally agreed that the field had experienced a sea change in recent years, no longer feeling the urge to taxonomise and no longer restricted to classic adaptations; work by Linda Hutcheon, Julie Sanders and Thomas Leitch has branched out to include popular forms, popular authors and other forms of adaptation, such as video games. Rather than the exception, this is becoming increasingly the rule within the field. Several participants drew attention to the diversity of forms and practices that may be said to be encompassed by literature-on-screen and adaptation; including mash-ups, fan fiction, slash fiction, re-makes and sequels. To the question ‘what’s missing from the field’, posed by Thomas Leitch, Doug Lanier suggested a way forward was to move away from issues to do with authority and towards a fuller understanding of the economics and institutions of adaptations. Simone Murray also indicated that analysis of legal issues in relationship to adaptation practices is both important and rarely employed.
Shakespeare on screen is, no doubt, an established part of the English literature curriculum but, on the whole, tends to be isolated within Shakespeare studies rather than viewed in the wider domain of theatre/literature on screen and it was refreshing to hear papers on Shakespeare films within a wider context. Of particular note was Sonya Loftis analysis of Mary Pickford’s use of Shakespeare to transform her image as ‘America’s Sweetheart’. While Shakespeare is always well-represented in ‘text’ to screen studies, popular, but academically disregarded forms came to the fore at the conference. Children’s literature on screen, among the most popular but historically despised genre, had its own panel. In this session, James Russell looked at the shameless marketing of the film of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to children as well as to evangelical Christians.
The diversity of seminars reflected the transformation of the field from canonical texts on film to auteur director adaptors, such as Truffaut, Resnais, Godard and Hitchcock, issue based studies, such as Orientalism in page and screen, the civil war on screen, to genres such as ‘chick flicks’, children’s literature, fantasy, teen films, team films, and the essay film. The panel ‘Film Dialogue and genre’ provided a further example of the plurality of ways in which literature-on-screen may be construed, with papers by Emily Bauman, Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff addressing inter alia the role of dialogue as a marker and constituent of genres. Thomas Leitch presented a paper on adaptation as a genre itself, distinguishing between films that position themselves as adaptations and those that just happen to be adaptations. Kamilla Elliott’s paper, ‘Gothic-Film-Parody’ looked at how Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide templates for, not just the usual suspects of films, but a dizzying range of parodic versions, featuring the likes of Laurel and Hardy and Tom and Jerry. Neil Sinyard’s plenary lecture offered comparisons between Billy Wilder and Henry James, reflecting on how such superficially different figures presented the expatriate experience in remarkably similar ways. The conference also enjoyed a strong vernacular flavour with several papers and panels addressing Southern literature and film, representations of the Civil War, and – from Rychetta Watkins and Deborah Barker – meditations on the enduring influence of Gone With The Wind upon subsequent texts and their audiences.
The conference also featured a Reception to celebrate the launch of the journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press, from Spring 2008). Sponsored by the Press, and held in Oglethorpe University Museum, the event marked what promises to be a significant new component of and forum for literature on screen studies. The editors reminded those present that Adaptation welcomes submissions from potential contributors working in the field.
On the whole, the conference reflected just how far we’ve come from literary-based, ‘not as good as the book’ approaches that have dogged the field for so long. The once-familiar rhetorical gesture that used to accompany any foray into adaptation studies – that we should abandon the moribund backwaters of fidelity criticism and break out beyond analysis of ‘the Classics’ – is now both redundant and inaccurate. We enjoy a wealth of new and thought-provoking scholarship and recent adaptation-related events attest to the vigour of our field. Next year’s conference, organized by Joyce Goggin, will be held at the University of Amsterdam. We look forward to seeing you there!
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See also: “Film as the New Shakespeare and Film on Shakespeare: Reversing the Shakespeare/Film Trajectory“, Deborah Cartmell (De Montfort University), Literature Compass 3.5 (2006): 1150–1159, doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00375.x
