Expanding Adaptation Studies

This book examines adaptation through the writings of constructivist theorists, such as Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner. It thus shifts attention away from the textual relationships involved in order to focus on adaptation as a process of acclimatizing oneself to new phenomena and thereby learning how to make sense of the world. Rejecting the notion of an ideal "reader" or "spectator", Expanding Adaptation Studies pays scrupulous attention to cultural, gender and racial differences and argues that individuals respond (or adapt to) texts in different ways. It suggests that when we watch a screen adaptation, we use the experience to adapt our own stories as well as retelling the adaptation's story in our own terms. In this way, adaptation can have a powerful effect on the ways in which we determine our future lives. Expanding Adaptation Studies not only draws new knowledge into adaptation studies from education, psychoanalysis and Fan Studies, but ultimately posits adaptation studies and visual culture as pillars of any future educational or theoretical initiative involving media.