The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity

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The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity offers a new perspective on the complex interrelations between literature and cinema. It does so by articulating an ‘affective turn’ for adaptation studies, a field whose traditional focus has been the critical castigation of film adaptations of canonical plays or novels. Drawing on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Marco Abel,the author is able to re-conceive literary and cinematic works as textual engines generating and circulating affect, and the adaptive process as a drifting of those affective intensities from one medium to another. By conceptualizing adaptation in this manner, the work steers clear of the chimerical notion of ‘fidelity’ (to character, to theme, to narrative) which has anchored so many analyses of adaptive texts over the years–and the reproving language that inevitably attends it—in favor of more productive avenues of investigation: What affective work are certain literary and filmic texts performing? What can this tell us, more broadly, about the underexplored affective dimensions of literature and cinema, and the dialogic interactions between them? The Drift addresses such questions through close, careful readings which put a variety of realist, modernist, and postmodernist works into conversation with each other, among them the fiction of John Dos Passos, Don DeLillo, and Susanna Moore, the films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as recent cinematic adaptations by Jane Campion and Charles Burnett. This methodological approach, helps to elevate adaptation studies into a discourse that speaks more directly and pertinently to our fluid, hypertextual era. Cover HalfTitle Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments 1 Theorizing the Drift Adaptation Where we are going, where we have been The persistence of fidelity Drifting Coming attractions: From theory to practice 2 Making the Old Words New: Dos Passos, Modernism, and the Cinematic Infection A more real reality: From realism to modernism to U.S.A. The man with the camera eye Time, history, and the newsreel Camera eye, kino-eye, and cinematic visuality End of the story, rise of the image 3 An Epidemic of Seeing: DeLillo, Postmodernism, and Fiction in the Age of Images Complicity and critique: From modernism to postmodernism to Underworld Our own private histories The power of images Ghost and shadow: Eisensteinian montage in Underworld Everything is connected: A note on paranoia 4 A Dark-Adapting Eye: Moore, Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir Contextualizing noir: Modernism, postmodernism, and “noir vision” Susanna Moore and the regendering of literary noir Recontextualizing noir: From page to screen to In the Cut Jane Campion and cinematic disarticulation Moore, Campion and beyond 5 Inventing Nat Turner: Charles Burnett and the Postmodern History Film The many faces of Nat Turner Thomas R. Gray’s Nat Turner Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Nat Turner The Nat Turners of William Wells Brown and Randolph Edmonds William Styron’s Nat Turner Charles Burnett and the “Real” Nat Turner 6 Drifting On Bibliography Index