Thomas Leitch, Six Ways of Thinking About Adaptation

From the 12 June until the 2 July, we are pleased to welcome Thomas Leitch as the 2023 Lars Elleström Memorial Guest Researcher in Växjö.

During this time, Leitch will give a lecture on ‘Six Ways of Thinking About Adaptation'.

About the seminar

This presentation surveys six ways scholars, critics, and general audiences have thought about textual adaptation over the past hundred years: as an aesthetic practice of copying canonical works, as an intertextual practice in which adaptation is only one of many kinds of transformations in a textual universe marked by radical instability, as an industrial practice in which institutions work to produce, license, and market adaptations in order to maximize their profits, as a quasi-biological practice in which texts adapt (or adapt themselves) in order to survive and flourish, as a sociological practice of crossing medial, national, political, ethnic, and ideological borders, and as an interactive practice marked by the ever-increasing emergence and acceptance of adaptations in which members of the digital universe actively participate in shaping new generations of texts they formerly would have consumed passively. Although it will consider these approaches in roughly the order they became widely recognized and influential, it is less interested in presenting a positivistic history from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment than in considering questions that each approach raises both about the nature of the adaptive process and about the operations of other fields from which adaptation studies have learned and can in turn teach.

How to attend

It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen