ABSTRACT
Adaptation is a highly specific process involving the transition from one genre to another: novels into film; drama into musical; the dramatization of prose narrative and prose fiction. The long list of terms Julie Sanders provides to discuss adaption, from variation, version, and proximation to revision, rewriting, and echo shed additional light on adaptation's various relationships and purposes. Each term offers an implicit theory that defines an adaptation's purpose and relationship a work may have with its precursor. In appropriations the intertextual relationship may be less explicit, more embedded, but what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer's, director's or performer's decision to reinterpret a source text. Adaptations may recontextualize older narratives to make them more relevant and understandable to contemporary audiences. The chapter identifies the ways that writers, filmmakers, and artists selectively borrow and repurpose texts or parts of texts as a way to serve a larger "political or ethical commitment".
