cultural rewritings, cultural rewritings across several media

I am going to teach adaptations, cultural rewritings, cultural rewritings across several media, across several platformsزdia, across several platforms. cultural rewritings, cultural rewritings across several media, across several platforms.  which means rewriting stories in ways that nowadays resonate with us, with you, if in the 19^th century the novel was a major of telling stories, no we still go back to the novels of the 19^th century, but we tell them differently.

And this is what we are going to discuss, we are going to look at the way novels or plays, or operas, or nonfictional texts or already adapted texts. Novels that had been adapted in movies and now have turned into graphic novels, or into games. All this – how they are adapted rewritten, recoded. What is particularly interesting in this analysis of a kind of trans- medial process is that we are trying to get a glimpse into a major shift of paradigm that we are all experiencing : a shift from a cultural based upon texts towards a cultural based upon, let’s say, the visual aspect. Of course the visual aspect is a very complex thing, it’s not just images, but there is this reorientation towards the visual, and everything has to be retranslated, remediated- that is very important word that people are going to learn and understand – and in which canonical texts will be transformed, so as to still be able to tell significant stories to us.

It is important, because the focus – the partial focus, to be true, of the course, will be the remediation, the retelling, the movement of canonical texts across various media. Partial, because I will be interested in the non-canonical form that texts acquire. I am also interested in the mediation and non-canonical texts, as well. But going back to the canonical texts that will be rewritten, reformatted, remediated: what happens to them? Of course they are hybridized. They are hybridized with other components: components of popular culture, of visual culture; this is not something new. And that’s what is interesting about this course: we see how, in way culture develops, grows. If we think of Shakespeare, who plagiarized right and left, we see that this process of recoding, remediating, is reiterated. This seems to be extremely important. What Shakespeare are you going to see on You Tube? We might see the OMG Shakespeare, which is very funny or we might see an opera broadcast  by Metropolitan, or we might see very, very sophisticated courses, explanations and so on and so forth. So this remediation, rewriting, adopts myriad forms. And of course it is our duty to try and find our way in this maze. Adaptations – visual adaptations – are ubiquitous nowadays. This is our culture. The important of the understanding of transition from the text-based culture, which still very powerful, alive and kicking, but, however, which seems to be ceding ground to the new culture, is of paramount importance.  Another reason why this course should be considered  important is because it touches upon the global dimension of the phenomenon, But you might look at it from different perspective, and that perspective would be transnational, which has less of the abrasive nowadays hated aspects of globalization, which has brought about inequity. And what I am particularly interested in is the negotiation between global forms of retelling culture, rewriting culture, and local negotiations.

I would like this course to be a copy of the courses delivered somewhere else: in the UK, in the USA, in India; I would very much like to stimulate the negotiations with local participation, local understanding, local rewriting. And this is why, if you consider what students can take away from this course, I think that the important thing would be what a great scholar of adaptations has called deep reading, that is aware of differences; we shall be comparing a canonical source-text with various adaptations, so this kind of comparing, contrasting, produces meaning, produces critical awareness, produces critical spirit. And it is this kind of deep reading that should be inducive to creative reading. I would really like to encourage students and academia alike to come up with a locally embedded creative reading of this process of rewriting stories. If you take a look at Romanian Shakespeare attempts are rather feeble, as if we are kind of shy. As if we are kind of overpowered. We tend to copy. Well, what about us? What about our local input? And that’s maybe, the final takeaway