Questions: Adaptation Theory and Cross-Media Transformation

Question 1

A film adaptation removes a novel's first-person narrator entirely and shows events through an omniscient camera. What is the most analytically useful way to describe this change?

• A. The adaptation is less faithful because it loses the novel's perspective
• B. The adaptation replaces verbal interiority with visual and performative means of characterization
• C. The adaptation simplifies the novel by removing its most complex element
• D. The adaptation improves on the novel by removing an unreliable narrator

Answer: (B)

Option B frames the change as a translation between media rather than a gain or loss. Removing first-person narration is not simply losing interiority — it is choosing different tools for achieving (or problematizing) interiority. The camera can track, withhold, and suggest in ways distinct from the first-person voice. Adaptation theory asks what the new medium does with what the source medium offered, not whether it preserved it.

Question 2

What is wrong with measuring the quality of an adaptation by its fidelity to the source text?

Model answer: Fidelity criticism treats the source as the authoritative original against which adaptations are judged as more or less successful copies. This misses that each medium has different affordances and constraints, so an adaptation must make choices that reinterpret rather than replicate. Changes may be creative interpretations that use the new medium's specific capabilities. Fidelity criticism cannot account for adaptations that are artistically superior to or fundamentally different from their sources.

The fidelity framework is the historical default and still shapes popular criticism — audiences complain when films 'change too much.' Adaptation theory shifts the question from 'How closely does this match?' to 'What does this transformation reveal about both the source and the new medium?' Kubrick's *The Shining* is the canonical example: radically unfaithful to King by most fidelity measures, yet critically acclaimed as a distinct artistic achievement.