Visualising 'The Waste Land': Discovering a Praxis of Adaptation

This research examines the issues and visual processes that arise in the production of self-representations derived from literary texts. The construction of a series of photographic and video installations drawing upon T. S Eliot’s poem 'The Waste Land' (1922) allowed for the exploration and analysis of how literature functions as a device to represent autobiographical experience within my media arts practice. The study considered the relevance and usage of the literary source in relation to specific adaptation procedures, in terms of what complexities were encountered and how these were understood. Whilst orthodox film adaptation provided a theoretical framework for initial experimentation, it is argued that my practice is positioned outside this domain, employing alternative methods of visual translation within a fine art context. Having investigated the purpose of my literary interpretations, I conclude that I respond subjectively to the source materials, forming autobiographical associations with particular lines, images, characters, themes or concepts within the text. It was discovered that this fragmentary method of extraction into isolated elements, corresponded with ambiguous visual representation of the self. Placed within the critical context of relevant female practitioners, I was able to detect a number of recurrent, elusive strategies within my own practice that signified a shifting subjectivity. However, it was the identification with Eliot’s subversion of his impersonality theory in later life, which enabled the realisation that literature is used in my work as a means of projection for visualising past trauma and operates as a form of displacement for a confessional practice. The thesis that emerges from my research is that by allowing oneself to respond emotionally and selectively to an existing text through transformative processes of re-enactment, literary adaptation can act as catharsis for the recollection and re-imagining of previously repressed memories

The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory

Shakespeare\u27s plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare\u27s plays. Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate\u27s audacious adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare\u27s plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words. Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period\u27s perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work. In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author\u27s relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare\u27s works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused—a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification. Jean I. Marsden is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. A scrupulous and well-argued study. . . . Marsden has written an important chapter in the history of the literary text itself. —Modern Philology A groundbreaking instance of what might be called a \u27post-critical\u27 or \u27post-ideological\u27 method. . . . Entertaining and information, this non-stop page turner is a gala opening-night event. —Besprechungenhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_dramatic_literature/1006/thumbnail.jp