Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-01T19:51:55.701Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

Jakob Lothe
Affiliation:
University of Oslo
R. Barton Palmer
Affiliation:
Clemson University, South Carolina
Get access

Summary

The challenges and processes of adaptation both resemble each other and differ from each other. On the one hand, all film adaptations of novels involve a transfer from the medium of verbal prose fiction to that of film. It is important to remember that this is a radical form of transfer – a “translation into film language,” as the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum put it as early as 1926 – regardless of what kind of adaptation is being made. On the other hand, one and the same literary text can, of course, be adapted in different ways according to the director's ideas, as regards both filmmaking in general and adaptation in particular. Moreover, the director's adaptation of a literary text is unavoidably marked by his or her response to, and interpretation of, that text; and as we all know, such interpretations can vary very considerably. As Robert Stam has shown, the main issue here is not an adaptation's “fidelity” to a literary text but rather a complex form of dialogue between two different media. Even though it is possible to consider the phenomenon and practice of adaptation as a translation from one medium to another, there is no “transferable core: a single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings, including even readings of the narrative itself.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×