Adaptation--Film, TV, Literature, & Electronic Gaming
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Adaptation Section of the 2010 National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations Conference
For Conference details click http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/national.php
Deadline for proposal submissions is December 15.
Adapting Politics
Papers on any and all aspects of adaptation will be considered, but we are particularly interested in politically charged adaptations this year. Film adaptations have, since their earliest days, been vehicles for political messages. The blockbuster status of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), adapted from Thomas Dixion’s The Clansman, popularized Griffith’s bombastic political message of racism and segregation. Later film adaptations were often more subtle with their messages. Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still took a more or less innocuous Harry Bates adventure story and adapted it into a criticism of cold war militarism and the nuclear arms race. In that same year Howard Hawks made his own cold war statement film, this time adapting John Campbell’s science fiction thriller “Who Goes There” into The Thing From Another World (1951). Unlike Wise’s film and Campbell’s short story, Hawks’s adaptation celebrates the role of the military as our only hope for survival in an increasingly dangerous world. High Noon (1952) is another ‘50s film that took a genre (this time the western) and an adventure story (John Cunningham’s “The Tin Star”) and turned them toward political ends. This year we’d like to take a special look at adaptations that have distinct political goals.
As always, we consider “adaptation” a way of looking at texts more than a particular brand of texts. Thus we welcome papers on video game adaptations, new media adaptations, literature to literature adaptations, and radio adaptations along with film adaptations. Papers on any and all aspects of adaptation (not just politics) will be considered.
Please send proposals as soon as possible to Dr. Dennis Cutchins (dennis_cutchins@byu.edu).