Introduction: A ‘Fleshly Dialogue’

This chapter positions the book in the extant scholarship of adaptation and phenomenology. It establishes the book’s argument that in order to ‘make sense’ of adaptations as adaptations, we must first attend to their sensual presence: their look, their sound, their touch, and how they materialize in the embodied imagination. This chapter builds on foundational adaptation scholarship by Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, and Christine Geraghty who advance an intertextual approach to studying adaptation. Rather, this chapter employs the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and how it has been adapted to film studies by Vivian Sobchack—to propose an intersubjective account of adaptation.