Adapting Edith Wharton. Martin Scorsese's The age of innocence

Abstract

The numerous impulses and ideologies that are at play in the transpositional practice of adaptation are continuously being revisited, rethought and refashioned by competing discourses informed by the most disparate of theoretical approaches to the study of film. One of the most influential of these discourses is Robert Stam's notion of "a dialogics of adaptation" which sets forth the concept that film adaptations are "caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation [ ... ]". A particularly fruitful approach that can be placed within this theoretical framework is the model proposed by Sarah Cardwell who argues that the traditional conceptualization of adaptation is flawed because it ignores the links between multiple adaptations of the same text and focuses exclusively on the relationship between the source text and its "version". Rather than the traditional comparative analysis which is rooted in the belief that each adaptation bears a direct and unmediated relationship only with the original, Cardwell proposes a model of genetic adaptation which views transpositions to the screen not simply as "versions" but rather as "points on a continuum, as part of the extended development of a singular, infinite meta-text: a valuable story or myth that is constantly growing and developing, being retold, reinterpreted and reassessed". As opposed to the comparative approach which would invoke a relationship based on similarity and difference between the source text and each individual adaptation, Cardwell's alternative, non-comparative model considers adaptations as cumulative and infinitely perrnutating hypotexts which can be shaped not only by literary sources but also by non-literary ones.