ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

medium and its conventions can be considered. And this is an important element to
consider in the exploration of a Shandean adaptation, since Sterne’s text is aware and
interested in the actual medium within which it appears. Bolter and Grusin use the term
“hypermedia,” which branches off from their concept of remediation, to label media that
is hyperaware and self-referential (Bolter and Grusin 53). Hypermedia make “constant
references to other media and their contents” (Bolter and Grusin 54) within the particular
remediation, since all media is a convergence of other, earlier media; the power of
hypermedia is in its attention to its medial properties, which provides an “authentic”
experience for the viewer (Bolter and Grusin 53). 80 That is, hypermedia self-references as
media and identifies all the other media properties within the remediation, as in, “Hey,
look at me! I’m an adaptation movie based on a book!” This is because, Bolter and
Grusin argue, no medium “function[s] independently” (Bolter and Grusin 55). Since
remediation necessarily adds to the properties of the original text, what results is an art
object that re-presents the meaning and themes of the text in a new way. This renders the
fidelity approach insufficient and irrelevant. If, however, fidelity is re-understood to
capture the spirit of the text, the intermedial aspects of the adaptation become remarkable
and included.
The recognition of intermediality works well with Hutcheon’s theory of
adaptation as an interpretive and creative process (and thus product) because adaptation
necessarily incorporates and mediates different media forms, beginning with the text. 81
There are choices made in the production of a film about how to incorporate the various
forms of media within the film adaptation. The “heritage film,” for instance, privileges
the text-to-screen transfer (should there be internal monologue or voice-over?) rather than
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