Linda Hutcheon

This is a book I've used a lot, but never actually read: I've cited bits of Hutcheon's work in papers I've written, and I've taught chapter 2, "What? (Forms)," multiple times. But I'd never actually read it as a book, and I finally gave that a shot this summer. It's as strong an accomplishment as a whole as I'd imagined from the parts-- Hutcheon covers a wide range of adaptations. When teaching the book, it frustrated my students (and me) that she often used esoteric adaptations, like the opera of Billy Budd. But in reading the whole book, this eclecticism is clearly part of her project: she wants to understand that human drive to adapt in all of its manifestations, and adaptations run a lot further than books-to-film.

Hutcheon's book has become definitive, and justly so. She fills in how media transmute, debunking a number of clichés we're still mumbling eight years later. She talks about the why and the how and the when/where, and she accesses a wide range of sources: not just the texts themselves, but the words and ideas of the adapters, and reviews of the adaptations. And it's even a quick and directed read!

If I have any complaint, it's that she gives short shrift to comics/graphic novels, lumping them in with "telling" media when I don't think that's really accurate. But that might say more about my personal interests than her book's problems.… (mere)

Parody is repetition with critical distance, and must be distinguished from satire (parody relies on reference to an earlier text or text, and satire relies on reference to reality) and from irony (an attitude), although the three often have a Venn-diagram overlap. (Why it must be distinguished—what the critical payoff is in doing so—was never quite clear to me.) Parody is conservative in its reliance on the past while radical in its revisioning. Context is vital—parody can only be understood as an interaction between the presumed author, the text, and the reader. Calling a work parody requires us to impute intention to the author or author-function, and understanding a work as parody requires knowledge on the reader’s part, so the study of parody forces us to pay attention to all parts of the author-text-reader-intertext relation.… (mere)