A Rhetorical Approach to Adaptation seeks to transform the longstanding debate in adaptation studies about the proper way to conceive of the relation between adaptations and their sources. More specifically, it draws upon key insights of the rhetorical theory of narrative to move beyond the debate between traditional advocates of formal fidelity to source material and more recent arguments that both sources and adaptations are infinitely intertextual. Despite their differences, both of these critical positions are content to compare events, characters, and techniques. In contrast, my rhetorical perspective closely attends to the multi-layered purposes—thematic, affective, and ethical—of both source and adaptation. By providing a new framework for understanding adaptation—source and target may use different means in service of similar purposes, similar means to achieve different purposes, and so on—I reposition fidelity as only one possible purpose for any adapter, while also detailing different kinds of intertextuality and what they accomplish in the work’s own terms. My dissertation moves past the original debate by showing that adapters may consider differences not only in media, but also in historical situation, audience, and authorial vision. As a result, my rhetorical approach provides both better evaluations and better analyses of adaptations and their sources.

A Rhetorical Approach to Adaptation combines its theoretical case for a fresh conception of adaptation with a series of new readings of modern and postmodern narratives. I have chosen narratives that foreground tricky problems of adapting print sources to film, specifically: how to deal with the shift in authorship in filming an autobiography (Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Harvey Pekar’s comic series American Splendor); how to deal with different conceptions of—and expectations about—flesh-and-blood audiences (Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”); how to set up and deliver an effective twist ending (Ian McEwan’s Atonement); and how to convey the ethical dimension of a narrative that depends as much on its narration as on its events (Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter). From these case studies emerges a new theoretical approach to adaptation, one which recognizes the fundamental differences between different media while also comparing them in fruitful and incisive ways.