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Adaptation studies and adaptation scholars have persistently been faulted for theoretical failure. Developing the argument that this critique is the fallout of a dysfunctional relationship between adaptation and theorization in the humanities, this essay examines particular problems that have arisen in adaptation scholarship as a result of adaptation’s and theorization’s impasses: tensions between theoretical nostalgia and theoretical progressivism, theoretical sprawl, failures in citation, mythological field histories, and transtheoretical field myths, most notably the claim that adaptation studies has been primarily concerned with fidelity of adapting to adapted work. This is untrue. The essay concludes that scholars instead attend to and critique our attempts to force adaptations to be faithful to theories that all too often obscure, neglect, and abuse adaptation.

Tie-in merchandise for Walt Disney’s and Tim Burton’s film, Alice in Wonderland (2010), dislocates and modifies prior theories of intertextuality in adaptation studies with the intertextual practices of corporate entertainment franchises. Poststructuralist and postmodern theories of intertextuality construct it as a subversive and democratizing operation, dispersing meaning among texts, dismantling high/low art hierarchies, and redistributing interpretive authority among artists, professional critics, and ordinary audiences. Even when tie-in merchandise for the Disney-Burton film is subversive of mainstream Disney aesthetics and ideologies, Disney and its licensed tie-in merchandising affiliates engage in rhetoric and practices that reincorporate dispersed and contesting intertexts, producing a portmanteau of ‘tie-intertextuality’. Consumers as well as products are tied in or incorporated as corporate intertexts through a rhetoric and iconography of acting, interactivity, inspiration, incarnation, and fidelity. The effect is more one of capitalist dialogics than of the Marxist dialectics academics have traditionally championed in theories of intertextuality.

“Refiguring Theorization” shifts from macroscopic historical and theoretical metacriticism to microscopic analyses of rhetoric. Theorizing adaptation has unfolded not only at the level of books, chapters, articles, and reviews but also at the level of sentences, phrases, words, and pieces of words. Analyzing relations between parts of speech governed by the laws of grammar makes clear that some problems of theorizing adaptation lie within the systems and structures of rhetoric itself. A microscopic study of rhetoric takes larger discourses to pieces not only to understand their workings but also as a prelude to constructing new discourses of theorizing adaptation. Rhetoric’s conjoined persuasive and aesthetic functions render it particularly resonant for pondering the relationship between theoretical discourses and aesthetic practices, with potential for refiguring that relationship. Figurative rhetoric (or figuration) is central to this endeavor, providing a variegated, adaptive rhetoric with potential to forge new ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about adaptation, theorization, and their relationship to each other.