In this dissertation I examine the relationships between textual adaptation and social anxieties. By looking at work by artists as varied as Jane Austen and Michael Powell, Patricia Highsmith and Ellen Wood, Anthony Trollope and William Godwin, and Robert Z. Leonard and Karl Riez, I suggest that there is a type of adaptation best understood as the defensive adaptation. These defensive adaptations manage social problems that have no legal or otherwise formal means of redress. They cluster around social problems that cannot be identified and corrected problems that come with the very messy business of being human: the meaning of selfhood, the terms of social responsibility, the tragedy of unexpectedly interrupted lives, and the always obsessive nature of love.
By looking at a broad range of texts, I demonstrate how these problems become lodged in the gaps that form when a narrative moves among media. Defensive adaptations mediate these social anxieties, in both form and content, by discouraging attempts to see the anxieties for what they are. I get around this problem by looking at scenes of adaptation. A scene of adaptation is, at its basic level, a scene or scenes in a single text where a narrative is adapted. These scenes of adaptation remove one layer of defensive adaptations mediation, and thus provide viable models for the way defensive adaptations manage existential social anxieties in culture at large.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06152009-155713 |
| Date | 16 June 2009 |
| Creators | Neckles, Christina Maria |
| Contributors | James Epstein, Sam Girgus, Jay Clayton, Paul Young |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06152009-155713/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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