True to the Spirit Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity

Adaptation persists as a major area of inquiry in both film and literary studies. Over the past two decades, scholars have extended the debate well beyond George Bluestone's influential Novels into Film (1957) by taking into account such concerns as intertextuality and different forms of narrative enabled through new media. A dominant trend has been to dispense straight away with questions of fidelity and "faithfulness," the assumption being that such views are naïve, moralistic, and rooted in a cultural prejudice against the audiovisual. While acknowledging the merits of this position--namely its complication of the one-way "page-to-screen" perspective--this collection seeks to put the question of fidelity back into play. The essays explore the ways in which the newer, more sophisticated approaches can still accommodate forms of fidelity between two or more texts without having to reinscribe untenable distinctions between "original" and "copy," and without having to argue from a strict media essentialist position that stages an impasse between linguistic and cinematic means of articulation. In addition, the scholars in this volume seek to recognize and account for fidelity's cultural currency among filmmakers and audiences alike, no matter how impossible fidelity might be in a literal sense. The selected essays offer an opportunity to showcase both well established adaptation scholars (Laura Mulvey, Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning and James Naremore) and emerging voices in the field.

1. - The Economies of Adaptation
2. - Literary Appropriation and Translation in Early Cinema: Adapting Gerhardt
3. - Hearts of Darkness: Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles
4. - Max Ophuls's Auteurist Adaptations
5. - To Have and Have Not: An Adaptive System
6. - Happier with Dreams: Constructing the Lisbon Girls through Nondiegetic Sound in
7. - Universalizing a Nation and the Adaptation of Trainspotting
8. - Getting Away with Homage: The Alternative Universes of Ghost World
9. - Indexing an Icon: T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and David Lean's
10. - Shades of Horror: Fidelity and Genre in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
11. - Contempt Revisited: Godard at the Margins of Adaptation

Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh and Professor of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the editor of Critical Quarterly and the author of several books, including The Butcher Boy (2007), T.S. Eliot (2006), Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2003), The Eloquence of the Vulgar (1998) and James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1978, second ed. 2002). He has produced or executive produced more than 10 feature films and more than 30 hours of television documentaries on the history of the cinema (for the British Film Institute and Minerva Pictures). Kathleen Murray is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her M.A. in Media Studies from New School University in 2003. Rick Warner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of articles on New Taiwan Cinema, relations between "old" and "new" media, the films of Chris Marker, and the video projects of Jean-Luc Godard.