Refiguring Adaptation Studies

Abstract

Chapter 9 considers how particular rhetorical figures have informed and can further inform particular theoretical problems within adaptation studies: for example, how figures of similarity can redress transtheoretical hierarchies valorizing difference over similarity, how synaesthesia can refigure medium specificity theory, and how figures of contiguity can theorize adaptation’s part/whole relations. It argues that figuration, as a relational rhetorical process, navigates far more complexly and variably between adaptation studies’ paired terms (adapted/adapting, entities/environments, repetition/variation) than theories have done, offering alternatives to aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, radical political revolutions of them, formalist and structuralist categoricity, poststructuralist deconstruction, and postmodern pastiche and pluralism. This chapter does not constrain figures such as antimetathesis, antimetabole, metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and synaesthesia to particular theoretical principles but probes them to generate adaptive concepts and methodologies by which to refigure adaptation studies. Whether we believe that there is a pre-existing reality that representation expresses or that representation is constructed, or a combination of the two—whether our interests lie in aesthetics, semiotics, narratology, history, culture, politics, industry, or anything else—figuration can revivify and refigure all theoretical and disciplinary purviews and create new ways of dialoguing between them. The chapter concludes with a discussion of metalepsis and the mysteries of adaptation and how the shift from analogical to digital technologies affects adaptation’s preferred figure of analogy.