National Conference
on
‘Re-working,
Re-imagining, Re-inventing:
The
Changing Faces of Adaptation Studies’
17, 18 November 2017
Department
of English
St.
Andrew’s College, Mumbai
Adaptation studies was
originally established with the intent to study
the manner in which cinematic texts altered their literary sources. However,
this concept has since expanded to engage with broader ideas of how Adaptation functions and the manner in
which it has come to interface with not
only specific genres of literature, film, theatre, media, and the digital, but also the
narratives that underlie these in a
broader social, political, and historical sense (Raw and Gurr, 2013). In
fact, it is now maintained that the field is broad enough to be conceptualised as an active determining
process that affects almost every aspect
of our lives as we engage with the world around us. As a field of enquiry, adaptation Studies has had
a sustained interest in how transcultural,
intracultural, and postcolonial contexts have interfaced with, interrogated, and sometimes
destabilised their canonical ‘origin’
texts. In India, theatre and film productions have historically
been deeply involved in this dialogue by
re-imagining literary narratives. Famous
examples include the multiple adaptations of Devdas (1917), including its most
recent and disruptive modern retelling by Anurag Kashyap as Dev D (2009).
Indian directors have
also taken up canonical Western texts to update
them to include local cultural issues such as caste, class, region, religion, languages etc. Vishal Bharadwaj’s
trilogy – Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014) – are perhaps the most notable recent
examples of this trend. As Poonam Trivedi
notes, while Shakespeare may have been brought to India as a colonial import within narratives of
cultural hierarchies, such productions
of Shakespeare’s works have engaged with and adapted this historicity to produce localised versions of
these texts, indigenous and postcolonial
productions in a space of intercultural exchange. The updating of these texts to allow for
modernised retellings, or the creation
and contextualisation of spaces for those traditionally under-represented in media, suggests that
adaptation, far from simply repetitive
fidelity to a source text is also a space of transgression, of ethics, and of new engagement. Adaptation
has also expanded the scope of scholarly
engagement with different mediums including not just literary narrative and film but also the
digital realm including new media, and
transmedia adaptations have increasingly begun to take centre stage with films leading to television series
or vice versa, merchandise ranging from
novel or comic expansions, games for consoles
or mobiles, websites with additional in-world context and
information, amusement parks based
around popular narratives, and more.
Additionally, consumption
of such narratives is no longer viewed as simply passive response, with audience
participation in narratives increasingly coming to the fore with hypertexts,
game theory, fan productions, and social media in the form of memes and clips.
Within these re-imaginings, these
narratives shift between conceptions of high and low art, the
universal and the specific—an example
being the growing market for revisions of
Indian mythologies as fantasy or young adult novels, as well as big and small screen adaptations of the same. These
shifts of power, location, and context urge re-evaluations and discussion.
Finally, adaptation studies has also
made an impact on teaching practices in undergraduate and postgraduate classrooms as teachers
increasingly bring new media into their
course structures, requiring an engagement with the manner in which these texts are now navigated, working
from source text to images on screen,
and the approaches we use to examine these effects. It is in within these very broadly defined areas that
we invite engagement with literature and
media on a wide range of issues encompassed by adaptation studies.
Submission of Abstract
· Length: 200 words
· Language: English
· File type: Microsoft
Word
· Font: Times New
Roman, size 12 pts, spacing 1.5.
· Biodata: 50 words
The abstract must
contain four-five keywords, and must be emailed as an attached word document to
[email protected].
Publication
Selected papers will
be published in our departmental journal, Ruminations (ISSN 2249-9059).
Submission of Full Paper
All paper submissions
must observe the following guidelines:
· Language: Papers
must be written in English ONLY
· File type: Microsoft
Word
a. Length: 3000 - 4000
words
b. Title of Paper
c. Author(s) and
affiliation(s)
d. Abstract (with four
- five keywords)
Format
Full papers must be
submitted in Times New Roman, size 12 pts, double-spaced.
Title: Typed in UPPER
CASE letters, bold and left aligned.
Author(s) names: Typed
in UPPER CASE letters
Author(s)
affiliation(s): Typed in lower case letters.
If papers have more
than one author, the first author will be considered as the contact person for
all related correspondence.
Referencing Style
All papers must be
referenced according to the format of the MLA, 7th edition.
Full papers must be
submitted before the conference date.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Pramod Nayar
Dr. Nayar will be presenting a
paper titled, "Literature (Now) Contains Graphic Language."
He teaches at the
Dept. of English, University of Hyderabad, India. Among his most recent books
are The Extreme in Contemporary Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), The
British Raj: Keywords (Routledge 2017), Human Rights and Literature
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016), The Indian Graphic Novel (Routledge 2016), besides
the edited English Siege and Prison Writings (Routledge 2017) and the five
volume set, Indian Travel Writing (Routledge 2017). His essays on posthumanism,
colonial discourse, celebrity studies and the graphic novel have appeared in
Celebrity Studies, a/b: autobiography studies, Biography, Journal of Postcolonial
Writing, South Asia, South Asian Review, Orbis Litterarum and Modern Fiction
Studies. His book, Bhopal’s Ecological
Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny, is due from Lexington
later in 2017, and he is currently working on an Open Access book from de
Gruyter, tentatively titled The Postcolonial Aura. He reads comics regularly.
Invited Speaker: Dr.
Rukmini Pande
Dr. Pande will be presenting a
paper entitled, "Filling in the Blanks: Fandom as Adaptation."
She has completed her
PhD on “Intersections of Identity in Media Fandom Communities” at the
University of Western Australia, and currently is an Assistant Professor at
O.P. Jindal Global University. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal
of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections on race
in media fandom, including Seeing Fans (edited by Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett)
and in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (edited by Anne Jamison).
Additionally, she has co-authored an article, "'Yes, the Evil Queen is
Latina!': Racial dynamics of Online Femslash Fandoms" in a special issue
of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (June 2017). Her dissertation
is also under contract to be published as a monograph with the University of Iowa
Press.
