Adaptation Studies and Biological Models: Antigone as a Test Case.

Abstract

After half a century of studying the transference of literature to the screen, largely marked by an obsession with fidelity, adaptation studies is finally beginning to emerge as a discipline that focuses on a multiplicity of intermedial collaborations and intercultural transferences. In short, it is moving from a basis in literature and cinema studies to a considerably more complex location in cultural studies. This has allowed the discipline to borrow some theoretical approaches and the terminology from its new context and turn them to its advantage. However, as Linda Hutcheon and others have recently pointed out, adaptation studies might also gain by exploring its obvious associations with biological models. This article examines Antigone as a test case for the wider application of the terminology of genetics, heredity and taxonomy. In doing so, adaptation studies will hopefully come to focus on the ways in which slow incremental change or sudden mutation always takes place within a cultural continuum. In an age of increasing intermediality and a wider choice of forms than ever before, ancient tales continue to be adapted to new environments. Once part of an oral tradition, elements of Antigone were adapted to a succession of innovatory forms, including the drama, opera, the novel, opera, cinema, the comic and contemporary music, not to speak of the central role of Antigone in the formation of the Hegelian dialectic. Like some biological organisms, certain tales appear to reproduce themselves in a multitude of environments, occasionally with a rapidity that bears more resemblance to a virus than a vertebrate. Still spawning successfully after more than two and a half millennia, the survival of Antigone is positively Darwinian.

Keywords: Antigone, intermediality, adaptation, convergence culture, hybridity