Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Sorry this is a little late…

Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s article “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”: Biologically” is a very interesting and different perspective on adaptation theory.  I found it very engaging and thought provoking, though I did not follow (or like) the homology to biology nearly as much as I did the ideas of adaptation.  To start with, as they stated, it is a “common determination to judge an adaptation’s success only in relation to its faithfulness or closeness to the ‘original’ or ‘source’ text” (Bortolotti 444).  The pair of authors clearly do not agree with this (nor do I).  As noted, humans have been adapting stories for as long as we have been telling stories.  We naturally adapt stories, whether from one medium or form to another or within the same from/medium but for new or different audiences.  What we cannot do is judge a text or work based on how “true” it was too the original because, if we are going to be serious here, there are not a lot of TRULY original tales.  That is not a bad thing; I’m just saying, we really cannot write outside of the human experience because, duh, we are human, and the human experience, though not super limited, has really, truly be done to death in the last couple thousand years.  To write anything you adapt from your own experience and from the collective experience of being a part of the human race and all the cultural, genetic, social etc. heritage that goes with that.

But back, to adaptations on a more coherent and logical level: films.  Adaptations are more and more common these days in Hollywood.  I constantly hear this: Hollywood has no new ideas left, and well that is far from the truth, there are A LOT of adoptions going on in the popular media sphere at this moment, but a large part of this has to do with one undeniable fact: people like adaptations.  So we may think to ourselves: Okay, so my favourite book is being made into a movie (it was called On the Road, and yes, it wasn’t great but not because it was an adaptation but because it was literally only people getting ‘effed up and experimenting sexually); it’s probably going to suck, but I am going to check it out to see how someone else interpreted something that I already love. Now all cannot be winners (see On the Road comment), but we still go see them, right?  We are the ones shelling out money for them and make it possible for them to exist. Adaptations are never going to be the exact same as the original so on a literal level they will always fail as being “true” to the original.   And it is debatable what the “spirit of a text” is as we bring our own experiences to the viewing/reading/participation with the text. No  two people interpret texts (even straight forward ones) the same so how could we ever agree if something was “true” to the original? Of course, I am not saying EVERYTHING is good because it’s all subjective and someone may love this because of blah blah blah… That is NOT what I am saying. We cannot deny that there IS bad art (even if people like it), but we should judge things on their own merit as art or text or whatever and NOT on what they are adapted from.  The relationships between texts, adaptations, originals, etc. IS super interesting, but it is not fair to judge anything on a extremely subjective “true” “spirit” of the original because, as noted above, nothing is really original anymore.  Thanks for listening to my rant.