Textural Analysis: Touching Adaptation

Abstract

While the previous chapters have explored the materiality of adaptation and perception, this chapter explicitly examines how screen adaptations appeal to the spectator’s tactile sensitivity. This chapter draws on film-phenomenological approaches—such as Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker—that characterize vision as being haptic and synaesthetic. Drawing on an analysis of Jane Campion’s film In the Cut (2002), I argue that the adaptation translates the novel’s protagonists tactile experience of her world and language into a haptic experience, in what I term the spectator’s ‘tactile orientation’. In doing so, this chapter further explores how not how adaptation should be considered as a textual layering of material, but also a textural layering that includes the spectator’s body in a moment of entanglement.