CFP (Edited Collection):
Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige
Adaptation studies has recently grown into a vibrant, wide-ranging field of study. Scholars in literary, media, and cultural studies have used the concepts of adaptation and intertextuality to explore how content negotiates the transition from text to image, image to text, and across media platforms and/or cultures of production and reception.
One of the key factors at stake in these intermedial transitions is the question of cultural prestige. As the written word loses ground to the moving image, it retains or even gains prestige as a locus of cultural, aesthetic, and ethical value. In screen studies, the rise of television studies in conjunction with and in contrast to film studies raises similar issues of cultural esteem. Greater critical attention to comics and graphic novels has also presented a challenge to received notions of literary and visual aesthetics. Adaptation across these and other forms is frequently, if not always explicitly, shaped by these perceptions of cultural value, and the rise of cultural prizes, or what James F. English has called the “economy of prestige,” marks one of the clearest (if not always uncontested) declarations of value in the culture industries. Yet this intersection between adaptation and the institutional prestige of awards–whether honoring accomplishment on the page, on the stage, or on various screens–remains largely unexplored.
Focusing on this intersection of adaptation, awards culture, and notions of value, this collection will address the relationship between literary, cinematic, and other cultural prizes and the process of adapting contemporary texts in and across a variety of media. We invite essays that approach this topic from cultural, social, and textual perspectives, and will consider essays that examine a broad base of prizes and assessments of cultural value, including awards made to authors, directors, artists, creators, performers, etc. involved on either side of the adaptive process.
Key questions we wish to consider include:
How is cultural value encoded into the adaptation process?
How is value embodied in cinematic, literary, televisual, theatrical, and other cultural texts?
How do adaptations shape or transform the careers of writers, directors, and performers?
How does adaptation interact with processes of canonization, both in literature and in other media?
How are specific textual features on both sides of the adaptation process affected by questions of cultural prestige?
How have recipients of particular prizes (Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer, Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Emmy, Tony, etc.) been adapted in different media?
To what extent is prestige transferable across media?
Topics to consider include:
Adapted Screenplay and similar awards
Television adaptations
Remakes and reboots
Auteurism and adaptation
Performance in adapted works
Adaptations of serial works
Genre fiction and adaptation
Textual and paratextual signifiers of cultural value
Reception of adapted texts
Festival awards and adaptation
A major academic publisher has expressed preliminary interest in this project. The editors are committed to publishing the volume within a reasonable time frame, and to keeping all contributors fully informed of its progress.
Please submit 200-300 word abstracts to Eric.Sandberg [at] oulu.fi AND kenkar [at] bilkent.edu.tr by August 15, 2015. Notice of acceptance will be sent to contributors no later than September 15, and the deadline for full essays (no longer than 6000 words) will be January 25, 2016.
About the editors
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University, Turkey, where she teaches film and media studies. She is the author of Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (2013) and has published essays on Bill Murray and Wes Anderson as well as the self-adapted films of Marjane Satrapi.
Eric Sandberg is University Lecturer in Literature at the University of Oulu, Finland. He teaches British and American literature, and works on the twentieth and twenty-first century novel, genre fiction, and modernism. He is the author of Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character (2014) and has also published on topics ranging from hardboiled detective fiction to the novels of Hilary Mantel.
The Fan Studies Network 