Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics (original) (raw)

A Companion to Literature and Film

Adaptation, mediality, and intermediality: these are the issues engaged in our text. Our original aim was to demonstrate that, in moving from one medium to another, the "subject" of a story-we will return to the issue of what we mean by "subject"-would necessarily undergo a series of informing and deforming constraints linked to what might be called the new medium's intrinsic configuration, since each subject would be presumably endowed with its own configuration. This configuration, in our original conception, would be always already more or less compatible with a particular medium and would thus preprogram, as it were, any process of adaptation. Beginning from these early intuitions, we decided to develop a deeper reflection concerning adaptation, rewriting, transécriture, and trans-semioticization. The first question we confronted is at the very kernel of the whole problematic: is it possible for the story (fabula) to exist outside any and all media? Or, to put it differently, is it possible to imagine a story in a kind of original virgin state, prior to any mediatic incarnation? The Means of Expression as the Occasion for a Physical Encounter We can begin our investigation by looking at the issue of expressive production and creation. When the artistic "subject," and here we use "subject" in a different sense, in the sense of the expressive artist, when this "subject" decides to express him or herself, he or she is always confronted by a kind of resistance specific to the chosen medium of expression. Human thought, as it "materializes" itself, always undergoes an encounter