ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

Hutcheon’ s theory effectively situatesRowson’s version as a work that does both.
Moreover, Hutcheon values the process of adaptation that reinterprets and re-presents an
original text in a new format. Similarly, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's theory of
“remediation” (47) explains how media in adaptations interact; Bolter and Grusin’s view
of media as interdependent and intermedial offers a mode of analysis that allows for
Hutcheon’s “double process” of adaptation, while it also regards the material aspects of
the remediated text (20). “The very act of remediation,” Bolter and Grusin write, “ensures
that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on
the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways” (47). Both Hutcheon’s
principles of adaptation, and Bolter and Grusin’s understanding of media, offer modes of
analysis that account for the qualities of Rowson’s adaptation, and how those qualities
interact with the original novel.
Rather than focus on the fidelity of the text-to-text transfer, Hutcheon’s theory of
adaptation broadens the terms for evaluating the success of literary adaptations. Rowson
adaptsTristram Shandy in an interpretive and creative way. By challenging the
conventions of the graphic novel, and incorporating the intertexts and contexts of
Tristram Shandy, Rowson re-presents Tristram Shandy in a new medium through his
retention of the qualities of Shandyism. Despite the inability to adapt Tristram Shandy as
a direct-transfer or modernization, Rowson’s version is a recognizable adaptation because
the spirit of the text, its conceptual elements, are presented in a new medium.
I. The Medium
33