ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

critically approached.
Fidelity as a concept must be re-imagined to account for the Shandean level of
adaptation, and the ways that an adaptation re-presents the spirit of the text beyond the
actual text. Fidelity needs fixing. Hutcheon's fairly recent principles of adaptation offer a
corrective to this concept. Indeed, the debate has almost become a sub-genre in
adaptation studies; many adaptation theorists recognize fidelity criticism’s theoretical
limitations. To renegotiate the terms of fidelity criticism, Hutcheon offers a “double
process” (Hutcheon 20) of evaluation that first values the “interpretive” process of the
adaptation, and then the “creative” process of re-presentation (Hutcheon 20). This widens
the scope of adaptation criticism to include adaptations that go beyond the “heritage film”
blueprint. Moreover, adaptations have generally been considered “secondary” or
“derivative” (Hutcheon 2) of the original since there is often excision or manipulation of
the text, but Hutcheon's theory appreciates the creative decisions and liberties of film-
makers when re-presenting literary texts on film. The focus then becomes on how a film
adds to, rather than takes away from, our understanding of the text through and because
of its appearance in new media forms. Hutcheon broadens the criteria of adaptation
evaluation to incorporate elements of adaptations, like the transfer to new media or the
intermedial properties of films, which are otherwise disregarded in the name of fidelity.
Hutcheon’s guidelines accommodate the role that the medium plays in the adaptation
process.
We are able to account for much more than the fidelity of an adaptation if fidelity
is redefined as a representation of the spirit of the text, rather than a replication of the
text, that is transferred on a conceptual (rather than literal) level; much more about the
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