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True to the Spirit
Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity
Edited by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner
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Book Presentation:
• Features contributions from renowned scholars of film and literary studies, including Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning, and Fredric Jameson, to name just a few
• Discusses a wide range of authors and auteurs that includes Joseph Conrad, Jeffrey Eugenides, Patrick McCabe, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Stanley Kubrick
• Examines adaptation in multimedia contexts beyond film and novel, including video essay, autobiography, graphic novel, and stage production
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.
About the authors:
Edited by Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh, Kathleen Murray, Doctoral Candidate, University of Pittsburgh, and Rick Warner, Doctoral Candidate, University of Pittsburgh 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.
Press Reviews:
"It is not too much to say that this book is simply ground-breaking, easily and by far the best book on this important subject, and one that should be required reading of all film and literature students." - Lee Grieveson, University College London
"True to the Spirit revives adaptation as a key conceptual framework for understanding cinema's intricate political and aesthetic dialogues-and disagreements-with works in other media. This is a generous book: it addresses a surprising range of films and texts, and will foster the creativity of its readers through its expansive, historically detailed case studies." - Karla Oeler, Emory University
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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