The Past Is Calling: Adaptation as Popular Cultural Memory
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2023-01-01
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Language, Literacy & Culture
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Language Literacy and Culture
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Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Abstract
Adaptation studies has long struggled with how, exactly, to understand adaptations. The field seeks to move beyond judgement-based analysis that continuously privileges ÒoriginalÓ texts over other versions of a narrative. Textual analysis has long been limited to categorizing similarities and differences, and contemporary theorists focus more on how adaptations are produced than on how adaptations operate within culture and what individual adapted tales actually say. To mitigate fidelity theory while still returning to textual analysis, this work recognizes adaptations as popular cultural memory, positioning the texts as cultural creators, and utilizes theories from television genre theory and fairy tale theory to create a method for analyzing adaptations as adaptations, moving beyond merely enumerating sameness and difference to understand an adapted textÕs interactions within its culture. This method includes delineating and comparing global kernels Ñ characters and character-driven plot points shared between versions Ñ across multiple versions of an adaptation, then contextualizing those comparisons within historical and cultural context. This allows an analysis that focuses on where the adaptation shifts away from expectations or returns to them, and how those changes or lack thereof maintain and subvert the cultural discourses occurring at the time the adaptation was created.
Three case studies of Korean television adaptations, Pinocchio (2014-2015), Splash Splash Love (2015), and Signal (2016), use this method to show how re-told narratives of native Korean historical figures, European fairy tales, and American films all have been localized for the Korean audience, and comment on contemporary cultural events. Each re-telling reinforces some aspects of Korean culture while working to subvert others. Each also acts as a bridge for Korean culture, sharing KoreaÕs values globally, in a form recognizable to international audiences, because audiences are already familiar with either the narrative or its genre.
By situating adaptations as popular cultural memory, and establishing a new tool for analysis, the global kernel, this work recognizes the place of adaptations within culture and illuminates the power they wield. This method offers scholars a path to contextualize the changes within the often-overlooked re-told narratives that permeate culture, while also discerning the influence adaptations have within and across cultures.