ABSTRACT
A key factor in all forms of ‘cross-border’ adaptation is what James English has described as the ‘prize economy’ (199), or the extensive culture of awards, prizes, and honors that facilitates the conferral, accrual, distribution, and fungibility of cultural prestige. When cultural products cross borders, be they medium-specific, cultural, linguistic, or national, a particular set of commercial and aesthetic issues come into play. On the one hand, a work that has already succeed in one context may well have a decent chance of succeeding—both critically and financially—in another; on the other hand, the very unfamiliarity of the work thus transposed may work against the desired success. Prize culture can provide an external criterion to guide the selection of works for adaptation and facilitate the transferal of cultural prestige into popular success. This process can then become to some extent self-perpetuating (as will be seen considering some of the examples mention here) as works that succeed in one medium or cultural context and are awarded prizes, selected for adaptation into another, based at least in part on their ability to win awards, within which they are again recognized through prize-giving. This chapter will examine these issues and others that arise from the intersection of adaptive practices and processes, the concretization of cultural prestige in the form of prizes, and the tensions involved in a cultural product moving from one context to another. It will argue that prize culture acts as both a central mediator within this process and a central motive force within the process as a whole—and thus within twenty-first century culture more generally.
