Milli mála - 01.01.2011, Qupperneq 92

92
Abstract
After half a century of studying the transference of literature to the
screen, largely marked by an obsession with fidelity, adaptation stud-
ies is finally beginning to emerge as a discipline that focuses on a
multiplicity of intermedial collaborations and intercultural transfer-
ences. In short, it is moving from a basis in literature and cinema
studies to a considerably more complex location in cultural studies.
This has allowed the discipline to borrow some theoretical approach-
es and the terminology from its new context and turn them to its
advantage. However, as Linda Hutcheon and others have recently
pointed out, adaptation studies might also gain by exploring its ob-
vious associations with biological models. This article examines
Antigone as a test case for the wider application of the terminology of
genetics, heredity and taxonomy. In doing so, adaptation studies will
hopefully come to focus on the ways in which slow incremental
change or sudden mutation always takes place within a cultural con-
tinuum. In an age of increasing intermediality and a wider choice of
forms than ever before, ancient tales continue to be adapted to new
environments. Once part of an oral tradition, elements of Antigone
were adapted to a succession of innovatory forms, including the
drama, opera, the novel, opera, cinema, the comic and contemporary
music, not to speak of the central role of Antigone in the formation of
the Hegelian dialectic. Like some biological organisms, certain tales
appear to reproduce themselves in a multitude of environments, oc-
casionally with a rapidity that bears more resemblance to a virus than
a vertebrate. Still spawning successfully after more than two and a
half millennia, the survival of Antigone is positively Darwinian.
Keywords: Antigone, intermediality, adaptation, convergence cul-
ture, hybridity
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE