Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films

Description

This book develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical ‘originals’ such as Shakespeare’s plays. Departing from the current consensus that adaptation is a heightened example of how all texts inform and are informed by other texts, this book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical works extend cinema’s inherent mystification and concealment of its own artifice. Film adaptation consistently manipulates and obfuscates its traces of ‘original’ authorial enunciation, and oscillates between overtly authored articulation and seemingly un-authored unfolding. To analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. The differences between these rival approaches to adaptation are explored in depth in the first part of the book, while the second part constructs a taxonomy of the various ways in which authorial signs are simultaneously foregrounded and concealed in adaptation’s anamorphic drama of authorship. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Introduction (Robert Geal)....Pages 1-7 Front Matter ....Pages 9-9 Dialogism and the Radical Text (Robert Geal)....Pages 11-33 Poststructuralism and the Radical Critic (Robert Geal)....Pages 35-65 The Dead Author and the Concealed Author (Robert Geal)....Pages 67-99 Front Matter ....Pages 101-101 ‘Fainomaic’ Adaptation from the Verbal to the Visual (Robert Geal)....Pages 103-155 ‘Állagmic’ Adaptation from Shakespearean to Non-(/Less-)Shakespearean Settings (Robert Geal)....Pages 157-182 The Drama of Foreknowledge (Robert Geal)....Pages 183-206 The Drama of the Diegetic Author (Robert Geal)....Pages 207-219 Back Matter ....Pages 221-247