Adaptation Past, Present and Future: An Interview with Jim Welsh

Year 2011, Issue: 33, 5 - 19, 01.06.2011

Jim Welsh

Abstract

“Adaptation Studies” as a discipline is a comparatively new phenomenon. In places such as De Montfort University’s Centre for Adaptations in the United Kingdom, adaptations are studied and theses produced at the graduate level; in several other institutions worldwide film and theater adaptations are both researched and taught. The corpus of adaptation studies material has been radically expanded, especially after the publication of Robert Stam’s Literature Through Film 2005 . However, it is worthwhile noting that ‘adaptation studies’ as a transformative act had been discussed by critics before that time. George Bluestone’s seminal text Novels into Film 1957 , defined much of the theoretical territory. In 1973 Literature/Film Quarterly was started; and since then it has incorporated essays of various kinds on the subject of adaptation. We interview one of the founders of that journal, Jim Welsh, looking at how and why it came about, focusing on its changing role, and looking at the future of adaptation studies both in the United States and elsewhere.

References

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