(Re-)Mediating Memory’s Materiality

Adaptation criticism may begin as an act of memory, but while adaptation is a medium for memory it is also a medium of memory. This chapter considers adaptation as a form of memory work, paralleling adaptation’s textual layering with memory’s layering of experience. Adaptations can offer us experiential knowledge of the past—either fictional texts or a historical ‘truth’—or be antagonistic or self-reflexive about its formal remembrance. This chapter examines phenomenological approaches to the ‘tissue’ of memory and puts them in contact with two adaptations (one prestige, one arthouse), both concerned with the experience of marginalized bodies. In doing so, this chapter not only asks ‘what texts are remembered?’, or ‘who is remembered?’, but also questions ‘how are stories, identities, and lives remembered?’. In doing so, this chapter points to how an embodied approach to adaptation not only involves aesthetic appreciation but also ethical understanding.