[ecrea] Call for Papers: 'Adventures in Textuality - Adaptation Studies in the 21st Century'

CALL FOR PAPERS

*****NEW SPEAKER: BRYAN TALBOT, ARTIST AND AUTHOR OF GRAPHIC NOVELS 
(ALICE IN SUNDERLAND, GRANDVILLE, NEMESIS THE WARLOCK; THE TALE OF ONE 
BAD RAT; JUDGE DREDD; BATMAN; THE SANDMAN)

Adventures in Textuality: Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century

Two-Day International Conference: Centre for Research in Media and 
Culture Studies, University of Sunderland

3rd/ 4th April 2013.

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Will Brooker, (author of ‘Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First 
Century Batman’, ‘Batman Unmasked’ and editor of ‘The Blade Runner 
Experience’).

Professor Jonathan Gray (author of ‘Show Sold Separately’; ‘Watching 
with The Simpsons: Television, Parody and Intertextuality’ and co-editor 
of ‘Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World’).

Professor Christine Geraghty (author of ‘Now a Major Motion Picture: 
Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama; ‘Foregrounding the Media: 
Atonement as Adaptation’; and the BFI TV monograph, ‘Bleak House’).

Bryan Talbot (Comic Book Artist and Writer, Alice in Sunderland, 
Grandville, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Judge Dredd, Batman, Sandman).

In the twenty-first century, adaptation studies has become a figurative 
combat zone. Some commentators, armed with post-structuralist weapons of 
dialogism and intertextuality, decry the analysis of dyadic 
relationships between source and target text given the wealth of 
enunciations spiralling within what Jim Collins calls the ‘intertextual 
array’ (1992: 331) Across the post-millennial landscape, digital 
convergence and transmediality have shifted adaptation studies foci from 
what Murray describes as an ‘academic backwater...intellectually 
parochial, methodologically hidebound and institutionally risible’ into 
‘an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling cultural 
process: flagrantly transgressing cultural and media hierarchies, 
wilfully cross-cultural, and more weblike than straightforwardly linear 
in its creative dynamic’ (Murray, 2012: 2). Indeed, the turn to 
poststructuralist models of adaptation have led to a dialogic widening 
of the analytical playing field to include the many varied utterances of 
convergence culture which include, but are not limited to: film, comic 
books, theme park rides, TV, literature, merchandising, and computer 
games. This orchestration of cross-platform, or transmedia storytelling, 
is ‘clearly...adaptation operating under a different name’ (ibid: 17). 
For some, adaptation is not a simple conjunction of source and 
translation, but a dialogic sphere of influence, appropriation and 
citation. From this position, all texts borrow, steal and assimilate 
from a wellspring of textual enunciations which demonstrate a “long 
chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests [and] ghosts 
of previous texts” (Miller 2005: 22) that have no static, explicit 
origin point. Stam argues that critics should ‘be less concerned with 
inchoate notions of fidelity and give more attention to dialogic 
responses (Stam 2000: 76). The rigid binarisms of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ 
give way to what Jacques Derrida calls ‘mutual invagination’ where the 
‘auratic prestige of the original does not run counter to the copy; 
rather, the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without 
which the very idea of originality has no meaning’ (Stam, 2007: 8). 
Perhaps, when it comes to questions of fidelity, it ‘is time to move 
on’? (Geraghty, 2008: 1)

For some commentators, however, fidelity is, and remains, an important 
critical issue. According to Dudley Andrew (2011:27), ‘Fidelity is the 
umbilical cord that nourishes the judgement of ordinary viewers [yet] 
for some time, the leading academic trend has ignored or disparaged this 
concern with fidelity’. As Geraghty puts it, ‘faithfulness matters if it 
matters to the viewer’ (2008: 3)). In True to the Spirit: Film 
Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (MacCabe et al, 2011:216), 
Fredric Jameson argues that excessive fidelity is annoying and that for 
original and copy to have equal merit then ‘the film must be utterly 
different from, utterly unfaithful to, its original’ (ibid:218). Other 
contributors to this volume discuss the dyadic relationship between 
novel and film, but offer something rather different to simple 
comparative hand-wringing and ‘the book is better than the film’ 
denunciations. For some, the adaptation is a different text altogether, 
while others claim that the translation is but one enunciation connected 
in an eternal ‘phantasmal spiderweb’ of heteroglossia and remediation 
(Miller 1990: 139). Rather than acknowledging that it is time to move on 
from fidelity analysis, is it not, rather, time to recognise the 
validity of multiple to approaches to the thorny topic of adaptation?

This conference invites papers on ALL aspects of adaptation and aims to 
provide a linchpin for all divergent and convergent strands of this 
burgeoning field. Papers are invited on the following topics:



Fidelity; Comparative Analysis; Audiences; Dialogism; Intertextuality; 
Post-Structuralism; Remakes and Reboots; Franchising; Sequels, series 
and serials; Transmedia Storytelling; Industry; Film; Comic Books; TV; 
Theme Park Rides; Animation; Computer Games; Merchandising; Paratexts.

This list is not exhaustive: any topic will be considered that fits in 
with the scheme described above. Panel proposals will be considered.



DEADLINE FOR 250 -300 WORD ABSTRACTS: 1ST DECEMBER 2012.



SUBMISSIONS TO: (billyproctor /at/ hotmail.co.uk)


Conference Organizer:
William Proctor
PhD Candidate
Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies (CRMCS)
University of Sunderland
'Regeneration & Rebirth: Anatomy of the Franchise Reboot', in Scope: An 
Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, available for free at:
http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/February_2012/proctor.pdf
'Beginning Again: The Reboot Phenomenon in Comic Books and Film', in 
Scan: The Journal of Media Arts Culture, available for free at:
http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=163

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