Description
Adaptation Studies have been broadening their focus to the study of how texts and stories circulate through or are conceived for a variety of media and platforms. While concentrating on the “traditional” novel-film adaptation, this paper aims to explore the interdisciplinary dialogue between Adaptation and Animal Studies. The representation of nonhuman animals in literature and film has been tackled by a growing number of scholars, but there seems to have been limited interest in how they are depicted across adaptations. My ongoing PhD research investigates the aesthetic, theoretical and material implications of the representation of horse point of view in novel-live-action film adaptations. Thomas Nagel’s seminal work (1974) has discussed the impossibility of accessing a nonhuman animal perspective, but writers and filmmakers have always tried to imagine and depict it. Therefore, on the one hand I ask: To what extent is literary and film language adapted to horses’ one? To what extent is horse language adapted to human media? These questions allow me to discuss anthropomorphism through Human Animal Studies lenses and to apply a two-way dialogic approach (Bruhn et al., 2011; Bruhn, 2013; Cutchins, 2017) to the study of source and target texts. On the other hand, I argue that there is a difficulty of adopting a unique adaptation theory for tackling both nonhuman animal point of view representation and the “question of the animal” beyond the text itself. Real horses are not “texts” and therefore their presence needs to be discussed through the lenses of Critical Animal Studies, in order to account for the material reality of live-action film adaptations and the implications of the of involving real horses on sets.| Period | 3 Jun 2024 |
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| Event title | BAFTSS Adaptation SIG - Adaptation Beyond Film |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Birmingham, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |