ABSTRACT
I have been arguing that adaptation-that is, as a product-has a kind of “theme and variation” formal structure or repetition with difference. is means not only that change is inevitable but that there will also be multiple possible causes of change in the process of adapting made by the demands of form, the individual adapter, the particular audience, and now the contexts of reception and creation. is context is vast and variegated. It includes, for instance, material considerations:
Likewise, the materiality involved in the adaptation’s medium and mode of engagement-the kind of print in a book, the size of the television screen, the particular platform upon which a game is played-is part of the context of reception and often of creation as well. Max Horkheimer and eodor Adorno famously argued, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the sound film had blurred the difference between reality and its representation, leaving “no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience” (1947/1972: 126). But even they would not have predicted the ontologically bizarre phenomenon of Reality TV. With its mix of fact and fiction, a show like Survivor is arguably an adaptation not only of “reality” but also of the ethos, as well as the story of Robinson Crusoe (Stam 2005: 99).
