Confy @ St. Andrew's College, Mumbai

National Conference 

on

‘Re-working, Re-imagining, Re-inventing:

The Changing Faces of Adaptation Studies’

17, 18 November 2017

Department of English

St. Andrew’s College, Mumbai

Adaptation studies was originally established with the intent to study  the manner in which cinematic texts altered their literary sources. However, this concept has since expanded to engage with broader ideas of  how adaptation functions and the manner in which it has come to  interface with not only specific genres of literature, film, theatre,  media, and the digital, but also the narratives that underlie these in a  broader social, political, and historical sense (Raw and Gurr, 2013). In fact, it is now maintained that the field is broad enough to be  conceptualised as an active determining process that affects almost  every aspect of our lives as we engage with the world around us. As a  field of enquiry, adaptation studies has had a sustained interest in how  transcultural, intracultural, and postcolonial contexts have interfaced  with, interrogated, and sometimes destabilised their canonical ‘origin’  texts. In India, theatre and film productions have historically been  deeply involved in this dialogue by re-imagining literary narratives.  Famous examples include the multiple adaptations of Devdas (1917), including its most recent and disruptive modern retelling by Anurag Kashyap as Dev D (2009).

Indian directors have also taken up canonical Western texts to update  them to include local cultural issues such as caste, class, region,  religion, languages etc. Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy – Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider  (2014) – are perhaps the most notable recent examples of this trend. As  Poonam Trivedi notes, while Shakespeare may have been brought to India  as a colonial import within narratives of cultural hierarchies, such  productions of Shakespeare’s works have engaged with and adapted this  historicity to produce localised versions of these texts, indigenous and  postcolonial productions in a space of intercultural exchange. The  updating of these texts to allow for modernised retellings, or the  creation and contextualisation of spaces for those traditionally  under-represented in media, suggests that adaptation, far from simply  repetitive fidelity to a source text is also a space of transgression,  of ethics, and of new engagement. Adaptation has also expanded the scope  of scholarly engagement with different mediums including not just  literary narrative and film but also the digital realm including new  media, and transmedia adaptations have increasingly begun to take centre  stage with films leading to television series or vice versa,  merchandise ranging from novel or comic expansions, games for consoles  or mobiles, websites with additional in-world context and information,  amusement parks based around popular narratives, and more.

Additionally, consumption of such narratives is no longer viewed as simply passive response, with audience participation in narratives increasingly coming to the fore with hypertexts, game theory, fan productions, and social media in the form of memes and clips. Within these re-imaginings, these  narratives shift between conceptions of high and low art, the universal  and the specific—an example being the growing market for revisions of  Indian mythologies as fantasy or young adult novels, as well as big and  small screen adaptations of the same. These shifts of power, location, and context urge re-evaluations and discussion. Finally, adaptation  studies has also made an impact on teaching practices in undergraduate  and postgraduate classrooms as teachers increasingly bring new media  into their course structures, requiring an engagement with the manner in  which these texts are now navigated, working from source text to images  on screen, and the approaches we use to examine these effects. It is in  within these very broadly defined areas that we invite engagement with  literature and media on a wide range of issues encompassed by adaptation  studies.   

Submission of Abstract

· Length: 200 words

· Language: English

· File type: Microsoft Word

· Font: Times New Roman, size 12 pts, spacing 1.5. 

· Biodata: 50 words

The abstract must contain four-five keywords, and must be emailed as an attached word document to standrewslitconf@gmail.com.

Publication

Selected papers will be published in our departmental journal, Ruminations (ISSN 2249-9059).

Submission of Full Paper

All paper submissions must observe the following guidelines:

· Language: Papers must be written in English ONLY

· File type: Microsoft Word

a. Length: 3000 - 4000 words 

b. Title of Paper

c. Author(s) and affiliation(s)

d. Abstract (with four - five keywords) 

Format

Full papers must be submitted in Times New Roman, size 12 pts, double-spaced.

Title: Typed in UPPER CASE letters, bold and left aligned.

Author(s) names: Typed in UPPER CASE letters

Author(s) affiliation(s): Typed in lower case letters.

If papers have more than one author, the first author will be considered as the contact person for all related correspondence.

Referencing Style

All papers must be referenced according to the format of the MLA, 7th edition.

Full papers must be submitted before the conference date.       

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Pramod Nayar

Dr. Nayar will be presenting a paper titled, "Literature (Now) Contains Graphic Language."

He teaches at the Dept. of English, University of Hyderabad, India. Among his most recent books are The Extreme in Contemporary Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), The British Raj: Keywords (Routledge 2017), Human Rights and Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016), The Indian Graphic Novel (Routledge 2016), besides the edited English Siege and Prison Writings (Routledge 2017) and the five volume set, Indian Travel Writing (Routledge 2017). His essays on posthumanism, colonial discourse, celebrity studies and the graphic novel have appeared in Celebrity Studies, a/b: autobiography studies, Biography, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asia, South Asian Review, Orbis Litterarum and Modern Fiction Studies. His book,  Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny, is due from Lexington later in 2017, and he is currently working on an Open Access book from de Gruyter, tentatively titled The Postcolonial Aura. He reads comics regularly.

Invited Speaker: Dr. Rukmini Pande

Dr. Pande will be presenting a paper entitled, "Filling in the Blanks: Fandom as Adaptation."

She has completed her PhD on “Intersections of Identity in Media Fandom Communities” at the University of Western Australia, and currently is an Assistant Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections on race in media fandom, including Seeing Fans (edited by Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett) and in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (edited by Anne Jamison). Additionally, she has co-authored an article, "'Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!': Racial dynamics of Online Femslash Fandoms" in a special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (June 2017). Her dissertation is also under contract to be published as a monograph with the University of Iowa Press.