Introducing adaptation studies at postgraduate level through American Psycho

Abstract

This article outlines a pedagogical model for introducing adaptation studies at postgraduate level through a case study of Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000). It argues for beginning the unit with a complex example that resists the conventional question of fidelity, encouraging students to approach adaptation as transformation rather than imitation. The lecture sequence moves from the linguistic and structural features of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel (1991) to the film’s cinematic translation of irony, ambiguity and detachment. This progression allows students to grasp how shifts in medium reshape meaning and form. The case demonstrates that Harron’s adaptation exposes the assumptions of fidelity discourse by reinterpreting, rather than reproducing, the novel’s critique of surface culture. The lecture uses this contrast to develop the theoretical vocabulary of adaptation, drawing mostly on Genette’s transtextuality, but also on Hutcheon’s notion of adaptation as process and Stam’s attention to medium specificity. It further examines the film’s horizontal influences, including its dialogue with other genres, visual media and contemporary reception, to show how adaptations participate in wider cultural networks rather than isolated text–source relations. Through this approach, students learn to analyse adaptations as products of cultural negotiation, shaped by historical distance, culture and form. The American Psycho case study thus serves as a methodological framework for postgraduate teaching that combines close reading, theoretical reflection and historical awareness to frame adaptation as an ongoing transformation rather than a single exercise.