Abstract This essay reconsiders the doubled fountain scene in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007). The film’s makers, publicity, and press reception repeatedly framed the adaptation through faithfulness, while scholarship has read the doubling formally without asking from what social position it places the spectator to see. Drawing on cinematic-gaze theory, a historically qualified use of apparatus theory, and Jost’s distinction between ocularization and focalization, the essay argues that three sequences—the fountain, the arrest, and the letter—organize classed mediation through different relations of seeing, knowing, and reading. They align the spectator with Briony’s restricted social position while also marking its limits; elsewhere, her retrospective narrational authority persists without her literal sightline. Wright systematically removes key passages of McEwan’s interior class-narration and redistributes their work across framing, shot scale, editing, and sound. The case shows how substantial correspondence at the level of event can coexist with consequential transformation at the levels of narration, enunciation, and spectatorial position.
Abstract Intermedial adaptation is not a mechanical transposition between sign systems; rather, it necessarily involves a reconstruction of the source text’s meaning. Adaptations may incorporate ideas and positions absent from or even resisted by the original text. These ideas and positions may be either progressive or reactionary and are at the same time multidimensional. This article uses Nobel laureate Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth and its graphic novel adaptation as a case study to examine the phenomenon of ideological reconstruction in the process of adaptation. This adaptation introduces Orientalist and feminist perspectives into the original work, generating a dynamic tension between progressive and reactionary politics. Bertozzi’s graphic novel adaptation perpetuates the longstanding Western dichotomous imagination of the East: at times it depicts China as an idealized utopia, while at other times it inherits the Orientalist lineage represented by Smith and Ross, portraying China as a poor, backward, and barbaric land. Moreover, the adaptation reduces the complexity of the character Wang Lung, intensifies his portrayal as an embodiment of patriarchal oppression, and alters or omits negative depictions of female characters, thereby demonstrating a feminist perspective. Graphic adaptation is far from a natural process of semiotic conversion; rather, it is a cultural practice in which the adapter’s social and ideological background profoundly shapes the final work.
Abstract What does Adaptation Studies do with a film that names no source text, appropriates a title, and yet inherits a century of Western travel writing on Morocco? The discipline requires new contextual territories. Since the 1990s, Adaptation Studies has moved considerably beyond its foundational dependence on literary source text and has diversified both formally and generically; it has not, however, diversified geographically, culturally, or critically. This study addresses that absence by introducing three underrepresented frameworks: post-colonial travel writing, ecocriticism, and tourism studies, into the field of Adaptation Studies, and by situating the analysis within a Moroccan context long constituted by the Western literary and cultural imagination. To that end, this study examines Lonely Planet (2024) film alongside seven editions of Lonely Planet Morocco travel guidebooks (1989–2026), a medium that is formally hybrid, at once textual and photographic. It argues that what the film adapts is neither plot nor a set of characters, but a way of seeing. Marketed as romance, the film operates as a work of film-induced tourism. Morocco functions not as a setting but as a destination to be consumed. Its landscapes, people, and fauna were organized for the Western gaze. Drawing on the ideological sediment accumulated across a century of Western travel writing, the film transposes the colonial gaze into moving images, reproducing, through filmic grammar, the same structures of looking that the guidebook genre has long naturalized.
