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While critics have rejected fidelity as a ground for the analysis of adaptations since the seminal work of George Bluestone in 1957, the logic of source-faithfulness nonetheless persists in popular discourse. This essay considers the persistence of fidelity idealism by positing its basic assumptions as a necessary component for the interpretation of adaptations as such. It argues that fidelity discourse depends on the fallacious assumption that, at some level, an adaptation can replicate elements of a source text in a new medium. By shifting focus from the ostensibly inherent features of the adaptive text to the perceptions of the reader or viewer, it can be seen that adaptation is a class of metaphor, depending on what Nietzsche calls “equating the unequal.” Thus adaptation is paradoxical; it is necessarily different from its source text, but must be understood as partially replicating that source in order to be meaningful as an adaptation.

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By examining the complexities of aura, authenticity, materiality, and reception in the context of adaptation studies, Chapter 35 argues against the idea that adaptations are a specific kind of text and in favor of the idea that adaptations are actively constituted as such through performance: through live and embodied acts of identification that have significant material consequences. Drawing on several foundational concepts in adaptation studies and performance theory, Chapter 35 articulates a reception model of adaptation that is relevant not only to theatrical adaptations but across media and genres by showing the ways the aura of adaptation is generated as much through the unique spatiotemporal presence of an artwork as through its momentary disappearance from its place and time.