Open Collections

Spilsbury, Oliver

University of British Columbia

This paper explores the rhetorical nature of adaptation. It builds upon work from rhetoricians including Aristotle, Burke, Booth, and Perelman and adaptation scholars including Hutcheon, Stam, Leitch, and Sanders to create a new theory of adaptation as a uniquely rhetorically effective narrative form. It suggests an analytical structure based around the internal rhetoric of adaptation (an adaptation’s capacity to persuade audiences to understand the adapted work in particular ways) and the external rhetoric of adaptation (an adaptation’s capacity to persuade audiences to understand the world outside of the work in particular ways). Adaptations are figured to be uniquely rhetorical among storytelling forms due to its audience’s familiarity with the works that are adapted. Hutcheon’s concept of a knowing audience is central here, as an adapter can leverage an audience member’s existing understanding of a work to make a persuasive point, enthymemetically, without needing to explicitly spell out their argument. This paper uses Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and its film and video game adaptations as a central example of adaptation’s internal rhetoricity, showing how the process of adaptation serves to essentialize a story, implicitly making persuasive claims about what a story actually is. It also uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet along with Michael Almereyda’s film adaptation as a central example of adaptation’s external rhetoricity, showing how adapting a familiar story into a new context allows adapters to make social and political claims about the world.

Text

2023-10-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86173

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/