Arriving at an Embodied Theory of Adaptation

Approaching adaptation—as a process, a product, and indeed a discipline—is a challenging task. As much as scholars attempt to pin it down with a dazzling array of interests, perspectives, and theories, adaptation seems to slip out of grasp. Kamilla Elliott, with expected rigour and clarity, has recently argued that adaptation actively resists theorization which are both ‘rival, overlapping, mutually resistant, cultural processes each vying to subject the other to their operations’. As she puts it:

Also assisting the disciplinary slipperiness of adaptation is the vast forms of texts, objects, and practices that are considered through the lens of adaptation, with each bringing its own critical traditions. Although film and theatrical adaptations form the bulk of adaptation criticism, scholars are increasingly examining a dizzying range of cultural products—such as comic books, videogames, toys, new media, social media—and cultural practices, including GIFs and digital communication and fan participation. But what unites these diverse forms of adaptation is us: their beholder. It is our sensual grasp of an adaptation that becomes the grounds for making sense of them as adaptations. Further, embracing a sensual approach to adaptation recognizes not only adaptation as occurring between forms, but also the adaptation of sense modalities as they criss-cross in the embodied imagination. As Elliott has put it, a synaesthetic approach to adaptation unites perception with conception, and ‘[what] theorization has torn asunder, let synaesthesia join together’.