Nexus between literary texts and corresponding film adaptations: a reading on intertextuality (original) (raw)
Adaptation study is a sub-branch of comparative literature that makes the bond between literature and cinema. Both literature and cinema are two different media and each has its own language to convey meaning. This article studies the African techniques of film adaptation from novels such as Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Biyi Bandele's film in 2013 with the same title. With the advancement of technology, people are gradually shifting from the culture of reading novels to that of watching adapted films, which becomes a problem, as it tends to affect their knowledge of that particular text. Thus, how does the African filmmaker, as compared to other European and American filmmakers, leave from the novel to the film? The hypothesis to this question is that there is a number of pure African techniques that the filmmaker uses in the adaptation of the novel such as editing, sound, modified scenes, excluded scenes and invented scenes. The elements of this study are analysed using the Film Adaptation Theory based on Linda Hutcheon approach and the Film Analysis Method, which is a pure qualitative method. The findings of this study show that, the visual and aural techniques used by the filmmaker are all involved to create a film with a new vision having specific effects on the audience. There is therefore a difference between a novel and a film so; depending solely on the film adaptation to get the meaning embedded in the novel is erroneous.
A Parallel and Comparative Reading of Femi Osofisan’s Maami and Tunde Kelani’s Film Adaptation
The affiliation between literature and film is not a recent issue, but the concern of scholars and critics is with what the extent of this relationship should be, especially in the areas of convergence and divergence of theme and subjectmatter. In some film adaptations of literary texts, there have been critical issues of convergence and divergence between the source text (the literary text) and the target text (the film text) owing to the influence of the technical components of cinematography. Tunde Kelani's Ma'ami is one of the film texts that have enjoyed filmic adaptation from a literary text. Using the qualitative research approach, we carried out a parallel and comparative reading of the novella and the film within the theoretical framework of dynamic equivalence. The study found that the process of adaptation has evidence of divergence but with a few instances of intertextuality, perhaps owing to economic, sociological and political issues that might have affected the interpretation and transition of the film from the printed text to the screen.
INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN NOVEL
Many critical theories have evolved as a result of the pluralistic nature of the contemporary world. There is a diversion away from the monolithic theories to more synchronic ones. One of such theories that have been at the heart of this strain is intertextuality. The relevance of Intertextuality to the analysis of contemporary African Drama has been widely discussed. However, there is a dearth of studies on the place of the theory in the production and criticism of contemporary African fiction. This paper seeks to partake in the filling of this critical gap. Therefore, in the paper, an attempt is made to do a critical examination of the relevance of intertextuality to the evaluation of the contemporary African novel. It is discovered that intertextuality appears relevant to the production and criticism of the contemporary African novel. However, we hasten to declare, from the outset, that a single paper would be inadequate to explicate the practice of intertextuality in African prose fiction; we therefore limit ourselves to a representative sample of related contemporary African prose texts.
A Comparative Study of Cinematic Texts vis-à-vis the Literary Texts
JRSP-ELT (ISSN: 2456-8104), 2021
Literature and cinema have always been vibrant mediums for expression. Their touching and moving appeal has made them popular across regions and time periods. However, despite their wide appeal, both literature and cinema are two different forms of art with varying audience and requirements. This paper aims to uphold a comparison between literature as a medium of communication and cinema as a medium of portrayal. The study takes into account few case studies to highlight the differences in the same text in relevance to the medium they are in. It also attempts to analyze the various techniques used in the two media to reach out to the audience or readers and tries to find out the effects and differences of the cinematic text and literary texts. The paper also briefly looks into the concepts of adaptation from one media to the other and highlights the benefits and drawbacks of both the media. Finally, the paper takes up a study of the influence of literature and cinema over one another, concluding with a comparison of their popularity across time and space.
A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation
Poetics Today, 2014
This volume comprises twenty-three articles on the aesthetics and mechanics of movie adaptation, "from the very beginning of cinema to the current day, covering historical, ideological, economical, and different theoretical approaches, ranging from the canonical to popular literary and film texts within the ever-expanding mediasphere" (8). Deborah Cartmell's introduction surveys the history and the problems of "adaptation studies." Then, in part 1, "History and Contexts: From Image to Sound," the first four articles deal with adaptations in the silent film. Judith Buchanan examines a sample of early silent films (since 1907) based on novels or plays and adaptations made after the transition to feature film (1913). In major cinema theaters, between 1907 and 1912, "lecturers," or "narrators," supplied a commentary on the films, and then their aid gave way to numerous "self-explanatory" literary adaptations in the second half of the silent era (1913-27). Gregory Robinson tells the fascinating story of intertitles in silent films: their conventional uses (conveying expositional data and dialogues, providing continuity) and the experimentation with their features and functions, compared with both commercial and experimental films later on (for example, by Michael Snow or Quentin Tarantino). Robinson also discusses the different styles of notable "title writers," such as Anita Loos, H. M. "Beanie" Walker, and Ralph Spence. Richard J. Hand's article turns to various (proto)modernist artists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century who experimented with intermedial adaptation, more or less successfully. These include Thomas Hardy's, Henry James's, and Joseph Conrad's adaptations of their novels into plays or films and
From book to film: The process of adaptation
Since its very beginning, cinema has always relied heavily on adaptations from literary works to provide films with stories. This paper discusses some major issues in the process of adaptation. First, the fact that literature and film are two different “sign systems”, each with its own ways and means to convey meanings and emotions. Second, the number of false assumptions about the alleged difficulty, if not impossibility, of cinema to tell stories as effectively as the written word. Third, the problem that for a long time, adaptations have been assessed on the basis of how “faithful” they were to the original text, thus preventing an evaluation of the adapted work in its own terms, as an original, creative, “new” product. Finally, the crucial role of audiences in perceiving adaptations “as adaptations”, i.e. as texts referring back to other texts, in a dynamic balance between repetition and variation, familiarity and novelty, ritual and surprise. N.B. A related paper, “Literature into film: Case studies in adaptation strategies”, is also available at Academia.edu
Literature and film: a guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation
Choice Reviews Online
as enabling his own analysis of Jane Austen's novel. 7 Historians have approached abolition and emancipation as many-sided phenomena, so that it is hardly controversial nowadays to argue, for instance, that emerging humanitarian and liberal attitudes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-the hallmark of the abolitionist movement in Britain-helped to pave the way for new forms of imperialism, and in particular the "civilizing mission," of the later nineteenth century. 8 Consequently, the liberal and humanitarian Jane Austen was an obvious candidate for inclusion in this new complex historiography, as an exemplary recorder of the multiple relationships between domestic and colonial in the interregnum between the first and the second British empires, and of some of the ways in which colonial questions were actually central to the elaboration of new English cultures in the nineteenth century. 9 The sophistication and irony of this historiographical approach-in which it is sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad-appeared to match the intricacies and ironies of Mansfield Park itself. And so Rozema's film picked up on and validated this academic approach. As John Wiltshire puts it in his recent book on Austen adaptations, "The film is the apotheosis of these variously political readings of Jane Austen: it certainly represents a meeting point or site of infiltration by academic commentary into the mass media." 10 However, while the film appears to validate academic hegemony over Mansfield Park, and over Jane Austen in general, against the middlebrow inhabitants of the Republic of Pemberley, in fact, if we read the Jane Austen criticism carefully, we can see a curious parallel between fan outrage at Rozema's film and academic disappointment with Austen's novel. Despite the undoubted importance of the revisionist histories of British slavery, and despite their formal analogy to the difficult structure of Austen's novel itself, it is nevertheless a common experience of modern readers of Mansfield Park that, for all its subtlety, what the novel lacks is precisely a simple, heroic narrative of abolition. Faced with the complexities of plot, character, and narrative point of view in the novel, readers often experience disappointment, loss, and even a sense of infidelity to an imaginary "original" story of slavery-just as viewers of film adaptations routinely complain of movies' unfaithfulness to "the book." One of Jane Austen's heroes, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, provided one of the best-known versions of that simple historical narrative. In his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, first published in 1808, the movement to outlaw the buying and selling of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade is famously likened to a river. A fold-out map of the history of abolition is included in Clarkson's book, with the names of famous abolitionists attached to streams or tributaries, linking up to form a large body of water: "The torrent which swept away the Slave-trade." 11
Nigerian Literature and Nollywood: Towards a Marriage of Convenience
2022
Literature has been a major part of the success stories of film industries around the world, especially in Europe and America, through adaptations of great novels and drama texts into films. How much of the great wealth of Nigerian literature have been adapted in Nollywood? This paper defines adaptation, giving literature review of successful film adaptations of novels in different film cultures, including European art films, American
Theoretical Aspects of the Literary Text Adaptation Into Film Script
Scientific Journal of Polonia University
The article offers a comparative analysis of both texts – the literary text of the novel “Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer an American novelist, and the film adaptation of the literary text. The article issues the question of the theoretical fundamentals of the literary text adaptation into film script. The problems that arise in the process of literary text transformation into the language of the film text are highlighted. Differential peculiarities of the literary text and its film version are determined. The research proves that the text of the novel “Everything Is Illuminated” has undergone particular semantic changes and the emphasis shifted from verbal to verbal-visual in the film text, nevertheless its communicative function has been preserved.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2019
Adapting full-length novels, short stories or novellas to movies has become a very frequent endeavour. Filmmakers choose (potentially) iconic literary works and adapt them for the screen so that they become accessible to very large audiences, which is to be quite expected in the digital era. This study aims to take a look at the symbiotic relationship between books and movies.
The Guide: Adaptation From Novel To Film
2016
Adaptation in the film industry is nothing new. Almost three-fourths of all films ever made have been adapted from novels, plays or short stories of the classic literature in every language. Our Indian film industry is of no exception. It is often said that the printed text is, in some way, superior to and more moral than the filmed version. The objective of this paper is to focus on such adaptation – the adaptation of R.K.Narayan's Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel The Guide to Vijay Anand's film Guide. After the release of the film Narayan was very unhappy because he felt that it could not capture the spirit of the story, and he did not like the unwarranted cuts and changes. This is true from the aesthetic view point, but it is equally true that a film director is not bound to the original and he or she has every right to eliminate or add some characters and incidents which are or are not there in the original text in order to cater the taste of all sorts of public. In t...
Themes in Kenyan cinema: Seasons and reasons
Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2017
This is a study of thematic dimensions taken by feature films produced in Kenya from 1963 to 2013. The rather expansive 50-year period is characterised by varied historical, economic, social and technological changes in the country. These variations have had an impact on the nature and growth of the film industry in one way or another. One such way, is the kind of subject matter addressed by the films. The main objective of the paper therefore is to ascertain the impact of the environment of production on the nature of the narratives emanating from the Kenyan feature film in the first 50 years of independence. This study purposively selects feature film genre for two main reasons; it tends to define a film industry more accurately than the other genres and it is relatively shorter than TV drama series, which, given its longer and steadier presence in the country, could have been the ideal way of understanding the social concerns on Kenyan screens. Text analysis and interviews with film-makers form the larger sources of primary data for this study. Secondary data, based on literature and films of relevance were also consulted.
Between words and images: A comparative study of Barlen Pyamootoo's Bénarès and its film adaptation
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2011
This study investigates the relation between literature in French and emerging cinema in Mauritius. It will focus specifically on a comparative analysis between Pyamootoo's novel Bénarès (1999) and its film adaptation (2005). It will first examine the themes of absence and immobility central to the novel and show how the film transposes these thematic considerations on to the big screen. Secondly, it will examine the imagined tale of the voyage to Banaras, the Indian city, which is embedded in the main narrative of the return voyage to the Mauritian village of Bénarès. In the novel, this play between the real and the imagined narratives is a crucial strategy that breaks the linearity of a conventional travel narrative. The discussions will demonstrate how the film deals with this important textual feature. Finally, it will ask if Pyamootoo's filmic transformation of his novel reinforces cultural differences that are discreet and underplayed in the original text. The responses to these interconnected questions along with a reflection on the use of Mauritian Creole as the film's language will provide a set of crucial analyses to review the concepts of national, transnational and universal in the context of Mauritian literature and culture.
Intertextuality and African Writers
Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies
It is a general misconception in some quarters that influence of one literary work on others is a denial of the author's claim to originality. That a writer influences another author does not mean that the newly produced work lacks originality. In fact, that act shows resourcefulness of the influenced author. This paper ascertains that intertextuality is established in the works of upcoming African writers and the mastery of its application greatly helps to boost the confidence and maturity of the writers as exemplified in Fágúnwà's novels. The influence of some artists on the literary productions of other writers is explored. With proper acknowledgment, the terrifying ghost of plagiarism is nailed to the cross by the writer. This study concludes that no writer could actually claim that he has not been influenced by one writer or the other. Therefore, borrowing is not a literary sin but failure to acknowledge others' influence on you is hypocritical and condemnable.
How Film Adaptations Make the Original Poetic
Culture as Text, 2024
This essay argues that film adaptations make the original poetic because the mode of expression changes from "telling" to "immersion." The author refers to Walter Benjamin's translation theory to discuss the nature of adaptation and makes use of several widely celebrated novels and their film versions as examples.