Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation

Abstract

Much of the current thinking about adaptation owes its orientation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of intertextuality. Chapter 4 traces Bakhtin’s most influential contributions to adaptation studies. Against the assumption that adaptation is the faithful translation of a core of meaning, a Bakhtinian theory argues instead that adaptation is a way of looking at texts through interdeterminations with other texts that all texts share to a greater or lesser degree, rather than a special kind of text that is uniquely interdetermined. Although all relationships between texts exist only in the minds of individual audiences, interpreting texts has the power to generate productive dialogues between readers and other readers, texts and other texts, which overcome the isolation of individual audiences.