Introduction: Adaptation reconsidered

The 2015 Annual Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education, held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and cosponsored by the Research Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings as well as the “Literature and Media Innovation” research project (BELSPO IAP7/01), was devoted to the theme of adaptation. As a traveling concept, pertaining to creative and critical repetition, adaptation provides a rewarding perspective and relevant operational logic in each of BAAHE’s subfields (English literature, theatre, cultural studies, linguistics, translation, and language teaching) allowing for theoretical and practical, methodological and interdisciplinary research, intertextual, generic, and genetic criticism. Presentations could focus on the product or the singular and repeated creative process, turning each adaptation of past sources into primary or residual material for subsequent creations in an ongoing practice. This also begs the question of the role of adaptation in the afterlife and institutionalization of art works and as constituents of cultural memory. Alternatively attention could be paid to the adaptation process’s interpretative function, from single or multiple author strategies and uncreative rewritings through the recipients’ stereoscopic or oscillating perception, to the authors’ and recipients’ shared need to mobilize their personal memory for adaptation to become a self-conscious practice. Adaptations can linger within the confines of genres, media, arts and disciplines but more often than not involve transactional, intersemiotic transcodings between them. Equally relevant research questions pertain to the evolving personal and cultural determinants of adaptations, their institutional contexts and discursive communities, depending on degrees of knowingness and appropriation, making for canons and countercanons or ideological reappropriations, covering a wide spectrum from feminist to postcolonial. These involve a politics as well as an ethics of adaptation, both receiving renewed urgency through the digital era’s ease of recombination, extending artistic creation into a generalized cultural practice both popular and professional, blurring the distinction between production and consumption.