Introduction: Tracing Memory's Role in Adaptation

Adaptation criticism begins as an act of memory. Equipped with intimate knowledge of its source material, the critic compares similarities and differences between characters, plot, and style, performing the kind of ‘conceptual flipping back and forth’ that Linda Hutcheon describes between the adaptation and their knowledge of its origins. Although the comparative approach has been dismissed as mere subjective impressionism, dangerously leading to emotional responses such as disappointment, contentment, or anger rather than dispassionate critical insight, Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration has followed Paisley Livingston's suggestion that the comparative approach is necessary to appreciate an adaptation ‘as an artistic achievement’, and that the comparative approach illuminates what has been adapted and how, providing a concrete basis to begin to answer the question of why.

But while adaptation is, on the one hand, a medium for memory it is also, on the other, a medium of memory, as adaptation can be thought of as a memory of an earlier work. And just like the performance of human memory, sometimes that memory is sharp, with the adaptation reproducing the features of its source with accurate detail. But, in other cases, an adaptation's textual memory might be more fuzzy, ‘forgetting’ elements of the original story or ‘recalling’ it differently by changing its tone or theme.