Textual evolution: Adaptation in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, film, and culture.

摘要

One of the most common responses to adapted texts---"The book was better"---evinces the often reductive and simplistic critical response to adaptation. Instead of dwelling on the limited critical enterprise of comparisons inherent in many studies of adaptation, this dissertation constructs theoretical models for analyzing adaptation as a process, rather than evaluating works' supposed fidelity. My theoretical models' central trope analogizes textual adaptation to biological adaptation to solidify how intertextual relationships operate and change over time in relation to cultural environments. This approach focuses on five original models---influenced by yet adapting meme theory---for exploring adaptation, mapping texts' associations through synaptic, viral, symbiotic, macrosymbiotic, and emergent paradigms. These models stem from readings of both the content and form of the textual clusters surrounding, respectively: Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert's synaptic connection to Beat literature and Einstein's brain; Koji Suzuki's Ring's viral expansion to other media forms; the symbiotic interdependence of Spike Jonze's Adaptation and Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief; Wells's The War of the Worlds and its macrosymbiotic affiliations to the invasion narratives, spoofs, adaptations, and homages it spawns; and the emergent evolution along orders of complexity between and among the textual threads of George Romero's zombie movies. Even though this dissertation performs original studies on texts, the process is much more important than the product; in other words, this study's primary yield emanates from the fresh theoretical groundwork it creates and the interdisciplinary dialogues it initiates among scholars of film, literature, and culture.