Adaptation Studies

The act of adaptation has long been established as both a culturally productive and critically debated concept which has gained renewed scholarly currency in recent years. This currency has not only reopened the question of how to define “adaptation” in the first place, but it has also lead to a number of further enquiries: What is the relationship between explicit and implicit as well as intentional and unintentional references in the intertextual networks of adaptation? Where does the boundary lie between adaptation and non-adaptation? To what extent is the much-contested notion ‘fidelity’ in need of critical re-evaluation? And what socio-political potential do adaptations bear? Our research projects engage with these concerns by exploring diverse adaptational networks, including the reworking of Shakespearean drama in current TV series and rewritings of ancient Greek tragedy on the contemporary Irish stage.

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

In her new monograph, Christina Wald examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series, bringing together plays as diverse as The Tempest and Coriolanus with serial TV dramas like Westworld and Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. The dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, the study seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.

Christina Wald, Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV (publisher's website)

Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet: Word – Music – Dance

In his doctoral research project, Jonas Kellermann explores the dramaturgical conception of unspeakable love in Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Reassessing the play in light of the recent surge of affect theory, he reads the story of the star-crossed lovers as a tragedy of affective community in which the self-proclaimed unspeakability of the lovers’ emotion nevertheless becomes verbally manifest in their amorous discourse. This complex negotiation on the affective (in)expressiveness of language has made the play an unparalleled source for musical and choreographic adaptations by artists ranging from romantic composers such as Hector Berlioz to post-modern choreographers such as Sasha Waltz. This project this brings together the thriving field of early modern studies with the intermedial discourses on Shakespeare, music, and dance.

Jonas Kellermann, "Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet." (publishers website)

Traveling Tragedy

As member of the interdisciplinary NOMIS Research group “Traveling Forms” Christina Wald contributes to the project “Traveling Tragedy”. Wald’s subproject on postcolonial tragedy will ask about the political effects that have been (and are still being) achieved through rewritings of tragedy in former African colonies. Yet, such rewritings are hardly ever direct adaptations of one particular Western tragic text or the Western genre of tragedy as such. Instead, the rewritings draw on and in turn become part of the transnational adaptation and interpretation history of these texts, which makes postcolonial tragedy a transcultural form in a multidirectional, globalized literary network. Building on Wald’s previous work on African versions of Sophocles’ Antigone (“'Why didn’t you just stay where you were, a relic in the memory of poets?': Yoruban ritual and sororal commonality in Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone") as well as on Shakespearean translocations, the project will use specific case studies to trace the question of how the tragic form has travelled and keeps traveling in our postcolonial, globalized present.

Relationships Re-Evaluatued – Irish Transformations of Greek Tragedy

Marit Meinhold’s doctoral research project analyses the changes in Irish family constellations as reflected in successive adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy. Looking at plays that have been adapted multiple times and that strongly foreground familial relationships, the project charts a trajectory from the microcosm of family to the macrocosm of Irish society as reflected through the relationship between individual characters and adapted versions of the chorus. The analysis of plays by Brendan Kennelly, Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, Owen McCafferty, Seamus Heaney, Gavin Quinn & Simon Doyle, Wayne Jordan and Colm Tóibín highlights a sense of crisis with regard to concepts of motherhood, womanhood, family and the indebtedness to and dependency on the surrounding community which can reveal itself to be a threatening force. Marit Meinhold thus examines Greek tragedy as a functional and culturally transformative framework through which major social and cultural changes in recent Irish history may be seen in a new critical light.