Adaptation Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–4 doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apn015 © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org 1 Introduction to Adaptation DEBORAH CARTMELL, TIMOTHY CORRIGAN, and IMELDA WHELEHAN Although screen adaptations of literature have been around since the beginning of cinema and have provoked the most intense debates among the public at large, the subject has been long neglected in literary and film studies. Up until a decade ago, adaptation was normally regarded as an area unworthy of sustained academic study. So why has it taken so long for a journal, such as this one, to be launched? We have come up with ten reasons. 1. Champions of film, especially in the first half of the twentieth century saw the adaptation as ‘impure cinema’ and resented the dependency of film on literature, especially during the period in which film was struggling to be regarded as ‘the new literature’, an art form in its own right. 2. Writers and literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century considered film adaptations as abominations, crude usurpations of literary masterpieces that threatened both literacy and the book itself. Despite her acknowledging certain aesthetic potential in film, in “The Cinema”, Virginia Woolf saw films as degrad- ing, with readers becoming ‘savages of the twentieth century watching the pic- tures’ (166). Similarly, the inaugural volume of Scrutiny (1932) included an essay on cinema by William Hunter entitled “The Art-Form of Democracy?” (enlarged in his book Scrutiny of Cinema), in which he reflected on how films target the lowest possible denominator. In light of this class-based assessment of film culture, adap- tations or ‘the fiction films’, especially, were regarded as ‘the new opium’ (1932b), unworthy of further mention in such a journal as Scrutiny, and were effectively banned from literary studies from 1932 onwards. 3. Academia’s institutional history has contributed to the problem: film studies arrives in the 1960s often as the adopted child of literature departments and so has, from the start, a kind of secondary status. There is an unspoken assumption which re- mains alive and well in some corners of academia that film is not a ‘real’ discipline and ‘anyone can teach it’. In these terms it is clear that those attempting to cham- pion the legitimacy of film as a coherent discipline might feel that a focus on the relationships between literature on screen only further diminishes this aim. Thus, studies in adaptation have until recently tended to inhabit a disciplinary twilight zone, tolerated by those in literary studies who might acknowledge the uses of ana- lysing some adaptations as examples of the contemporary uses to which literature is put and resisted by those in film studies who regard it as an erosion of the field. 4. Most of the criticism, until the twenty-first century, was woefully predictable, judg- ing an adaptation’s merit by its closeness to its literary source or, even more vaguely, ‘the spirit’ of the book. Logocentricism or a belief that words come first and that literature is better than film has been prevalent. at University of Utah on November 11, 2011 http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from