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ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE
very binary hierarchies they are attempting to deconstruct or at
least undermine.2 In recent years, some attempts have been made to
shift the issue of adaptation to new and more scientific ground.
Linda Hutcheon is perhaps foremost among those theorists who
want to look at adaptation as a ‘process’ and not simply as a
‘product.’ To this end, Hutcheon’s book-length study The Theory of
Adaptation, which appeared five years ago and, to an even greater
extent, an article she co-wrote a year later, provocatively suggest
that adaptation studies might do well to at least consider some of
the terminology employed by biology.3 By dividing various written,
visual and audio works into genotypes and phenotypes, concentrating
on replication and mutation (both of which comprise repetition
with variations), Hutcheon hopes to encourage us to ‘redefine’ the
concept of success. Instead of using fidelity to measure success and
thereby restricting itself to qualitative pronouncements, adaptation
studies might then clear itself some space to focus on what survives
in an adaptation, how it survives, and what new forms emerge to
secure further survival.
Some will argue that this approach is only pseudoscientific and
that Hutcheon is merely restating the aims and methods of memet-
ics. Taking its name from Richard Dawkins’ coinage of meme, mean-
ing a ‘unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’ and cor-
responding to the gene, memetics is the study of what might be
called the mechanics of culture. The meme, unlike its biological
counterpart the gene, need not be any particular size. It can be ap-
plied to a theme, a thread, a leitmotif, or even to an entire work.
For Dawkins, the crucial concept is imitation—he originally cre-
2 From George Bluestone’s seminal Novels into Film, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1957, to Mireia Aragay’s (ed.) Books in Motion, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, a plethora of volumes
has followed this pattern, almost all of them prefaced by an introduction that deplores the persist-
ence of measuring films against books. See, for example, Cartmell and Whelehan’s introduction to
The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen: ‘This book looks at literary texts not as primary
sources but as “intertexts,” one (albeit dominant) of a multiplicity of perspectives, thereby freeing
an adaptation from unprofitable “eye for eye” comparisons’, p. 3, or John Golden’s ‘Literature into
Film (and back Again): Another Look at the Old Dog’, The English Journal, 1/2007, pp. 24–30).
The pairs ‘fiction and film’, ‘page and screen’, ‘novel and cinema’ appear with striking regularity.
3 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, Oxford: Routledge, 2006 and Linda Hutcheon and Gary
R. Bortolotti, ‘On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” –
Biologically’, New Literary History 2/2007, pp. 443–58.