Analysis Of Dudley Andrew's Adaptation

Dudley Andrew is a renowned twenty-first century film theorist who has published several books and articles about film studies that are widely used in academia and film critics. His article, Adaptation, was first published in Concepts in Film Theory (1984). Adaptation in the film industry had not received much attention at the time that Andrew published his article. In the article, he uses the semiotics of Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman to investigate crucial issues related to adaptation, with a particular focus on adaptation from literature to film. Andrew’s work helps readers understand the difficulties in transforming a written work into film. This paper provides an overview of Andrew’s work and assesses its overall appeal to scholars and critics. Andrew probes the mysteries surrounding the …show more content…
In some instances, he examines the fidelity of the adapted works, but nowhere considers the deliberate infidelity that might appear in films. There are several films that violate numerous aspects of the original stories. For example, there are multiple adaptations of the notorious English novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. In 2010, Rob Letterman directed the most recent adaptation. In the film, the narrative takes a rather different tone than the original story. Several settings relate to the non-fictional present. The main actor wears modern clothes, speaks with modern slang, and at one point even wrestles with a robot. In short, it is an action-comedy film that steered away from the actual story. According to Andrew’s classification, this type of adaptation is possible to fit more than one of the three modes that he identifies. These modes are not clear-cut if one is to distinguish between them. The examples he provides could not illuminate such a