The Grammar of Transformations

The grammar of Transformations

• Source Novel Hypotext’s

• Complex Series of Operations:

Selection, Amplification, Concretization, Actualization, Critique, Extrapolation,

Analogization, Popularization and Reculturalization


• Source Novel - A situated utterance produced in one medium and in one historical context, then...

• Adaptation - transformed into another equally

situated utterance that is produced in a diferent context and in a different medium .


• “The source novel forms a dense informational network, a series of verbal cues that the adapting film text can then take up, amplify, ignore, subvert, or transform.” Pg. 68


• The adaptation makes these alteration according to the context that it will be

produced, shifting the genres and intertexts. Taking into acount:

Studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteurist, predilections,

charismatic stars, economic advantage or disadvantage, and evolving technology.


• Central to the transformational grammar of adaptation are variation in:

o Locale – Setting placeo Time - Sumarizing, Lengthening

o Language - Accent


• “The question of intertext also brings the question of parody.” pg. 70

Transmutations of plot and character

• Is common in adaptation concetrates it focus on actions which has to do with plot events and characters.

• The common dillema in adaptation is which charaters in the novel will live or die.

Novel Plot… Adaptation


• In the same way adaptations sacrifices characters and scenes, it also add extra characters.

• “Characters can also be subtly changed.” pg 71• “Film adaptations usually make temporal

changes as well.” pg 71 (One year in one day, one hour in one day)


• Adaptations also add events, it is motivades by many reasons as “take advantage of a brilliant actor, to suggest contemporary relevance, or to “correct” the novel for aesthetic reasons”. pg 72

• “Film adaptations of novels often change novelistic events for(perhaps unconscious) ideological reasons.” pg. 73


• Does the film adaptation maintain the point of view and the focalization of the novel?

Unreliable Narrator (Novel) Vs.

Impersonal Narration (Film)


• Some materials in the novels are often ignored, some of these materials are excluded, and so called “uncinematic”.


• “To what extent are the source novel and the film adaptation innovative in aesthetic terms, and if they are innovative, ate they innovative in the same way?” pg. 73


• “...our statements about films based on novels or other sources need to be less moralistic, less panicked, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchics, more rooted in contextual and interxtextual history.” pg. 75


• “... We nedd to be less concerned with inchoate notions of “fidelity”, and to give more attention to dialogical respondes – to readings, critiques, ibnterpretations, and rewrittings of prior material.” Pg. 76

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The Grammar of Transformations