Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal
Modern cultural, literary and linguistic perspectives
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal
Modern cultural, literary and linguistic perspectives
Editorial Introduction
The fifteenth issue of Freeside is a collection of papers that focus on adaptation, understood as a broad term related to various phenomena. As stated in the call for papers, the editors felt that the value of the ability to adjust to radically altered environments in a brief period was ever-increasing in both scholarly and everyday contexts, and they invited contributions that discuss specific examples of this phenomenon.
The papers can be divided into two groups. The first explores adaptation in the context of interactions between cultures. Oksana Babelyuk’s “Adaptation of Indigenous Storytelling in Indigenous Australian Literature: Narrative and Poetic Aspects” examines several creation stories. Special emphasis is given to Indigenous concepts like Country, Mother Nature, Lore, Law, Connection, Story, Love, and Sharing; they are viewed through the lens of Indigenous spirituality. Krisztina Kodó’s “Storytelling: Adaptability and Expansion of American Indian and Indigenous Culture” focuses on North American Indigenous storytelling, which defines and expands American Indian Indigenous heritage and ensures their survival and capacity for resilience. The article examines the function of stories and oral storytelling in North American Indigenous traditional culture through the works of Cherokee author Thomas King and Esselen-Chumash author and researcher Deborah Miranda. Attila Takács’ “Adapting Narratives: Comparative Insights into John Ford’s The Searchers and Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit as an ’Indigenous Canadian Western’” is a comparative analysis of John Ford’s The Searchers and Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit which illuminates a significant and multifaceted dialogue between traditional Western cinematic conventions and Indigenous storytelling traditions. A co-authored article by Bálint Szele and Iris Kolis, “Modification Needed: Perceptions of Students about India, Nigeria, and South Africa”, discusses three multicultural countries—India, Nigeria, and South Africa—as significant players in the English-speaking world and seeks to gather empirical data on what Hungarian and Albanian learners of English know about these countries. The surveyed population, consisting primarily of students studying English or Translation Studies (BA or MA level), had very limited knowledge of Indian culture and almost none regarding Nigerian or South African culture.
Other essays approach adaptation in its more direct sense: the transfer or the recreation of literary works in different media. Evelin Bariz’s “Stage Adaptation and the Theatre as a Medium: The Impact of Filmed Performances on Audience Reception and Experience in the Case of Gregory Doran’s and Lyndsey Turner’s Hamlet Adaptations” seeks to examine how recordings of stage productions affect audience reception and experience, using two contemporary stage adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as examples: Gregory Doran’s 2009 version for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 version for the Barbican Theatre. Iris Klosi and Bálint Szele’s other paper, “Adapting Shakespeare: Tirana University English Language Students Bridging Classic Themes with Contemporary Perspectives in The Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You,” analyzes a project carried out by Tirana University English Language students. As a test of the pedagogical value of creative engagements with literary works, the students were asked to complement their studies of Shakespeare by adapting into a 50-minute play the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, which in turn adapts The Taming of the Shew. Klosi and Szele examine creative choices made in the students’ adaptation, including “changes in vernacular, costume, set design, lighting, and music”, and argue that these changes show “how the project enhanced the students’ linguistic abilities” and “deepened their understanding of Shakespearean drama”. Péter Tamás’ paper “Courtly Love in Paul Auster’s Screenplay Adaptation of The Inner Life of Martin Frost” discusses the strategies Auster employed to extend a story that originally appeared as an embedded story in his novel The Book of Illusions into a screenplay for a feature-length film. Tamás examines the screenplay from a psychoanalytical angle, arguing that the new scenes resonate with Jacques Lacan’s analysis on courtly love and allow Auster to express ideas that the novel communicated through different means.
The issue is rounded out by three book reviews. Ágnes Harasztos reviews a volume of essays, Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies, which adopts concepts from spatiality studies to analyze Hungarian literary works, films, and memorial sites. Harasztos praises the volume, among other things, for channeling Hungarian scholarship into international research: the volume “appl[ies] critical tools familiar to those immersed in English literary and cultural studies.” Viktória Albert and Judit Szitó review David Crystal’s 50 Questions About English Usage (2021), which provides insights into how certain past and modern features of English shape its present usage. Crystal, according to the reviewers, also encourages his readers to understand the reasons behind all these changes, to appreciate the dynamic nature of the language, and to adopt a more informed perspective on language use. Krisztina Kodó reviews Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits (2019), a novel based on the life and career of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), an Irish-Greek writer, journalist, teacher, and essayist. Truong’s novel is about a man in constant search of himself, whose life is about his broken family relationships and his special love affairs. Instead of addressing the writer directly, Truong addresses the women who have had the greatest influence on his life.
The theme of adapting, adaptations and adaptions offer a wide range of interpretations and approaches from varied fields of research conducted across multiple disciplines. The articles and reviews featuring in the present issue of Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal are evidence of the multitude of perspectives that the theme can offer.
