Deploy Printer Drivers Script. The Fidelity Reflex 1When Robert Stam entitles one of his recent efforts to theorise adaptation “Beyond Fidelity,” he could be speaking for a wide range of critics (54). Indeed, as the editor of two major adaptation anthologies, he is speaking for them. Stam’s principal objection is the covert moralising of fidelity discourse: “The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. The standard rhetoric has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film” (“Introduction”, 3). 2There are problems with fidelity discourse beyond its implied moralising. For Robert B. Ray and Dudley Andrew, the problem with fidelity is that it makes for boring criticism.

The issue of fidelity has been a battle-ground for film theorists since the beginning of film theory as an established discipline, that is, when film became worthy of being studied by specialists. The debate is still active and some suggest that adaptation and film, in general, is an art-form inferior to literature. Today we will be working on writing scripts for our films. In order to do this properly, you need to know your characters really well.

“Unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome discussion of adaptation (and of film and literature relations as well) concerns fidelity and transformation” (31). Hp Deskjet 1180c Driver For Windows 10. Part of what makes this discussion tiresome is its unswaying commitment to the historically dubious and logically unnecessary assumption that “the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential about an original text” (Andrew, 31).

Linda Hutcheon, similarly bored with fidelity discussions, highlights the same logical flaw: “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (7). 3Hutcheon may be writing 25 years after Andrew, but she still has something to gain by attacking what was, until recently, “the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies” (7)—what Stam calls “the conventional language” and “the standard rhetoric” (3); what Ray calls (citing Jonathan Culler) “an endless series of twenty-page articles” (47).

What she has to gain is the ability to talk about what interests her: “there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the ‘original’” (7). This is a personal victory, not a disciplinary one (“Of more interest to me;” “I have always had a strong interest in what has come to be called ‘intertextuality’” [xii]). Still, it is a victory, if only on that scale. 4Andrew, by contrast, hoped his attacks on fidelity discourse would change the discipline. “Let us not use [adaptation] to fight battles over the essence of the media or the inviolability of individual artworks.

Let us use it as we use all cultural practices” (37). Reviewing Andrew’s essay in 1984, Christopher Orr was more pessimistic about attempts to change adaptation studies, and blunt about his disciplinary aims: “Given the problematic nature of the discourse of fidelity, one is tempted to call for a moratorium on adaptation studies” (72). And looking back on Andrew and Orr, Ray agreed that harsh measures were necessary for the field, but he more or less blamed Andrew for offering a fillip to fidelity in his call for more sociologically aware studies of adaptation. “I think we more urgently need to know something else” (48).