Creating and Analyzing Your Adaptation

Part 1: Creating an Adaptation: 2.5 Pages

Your Task: choose any of the following texts to adapt:  Beloved. (see uploaded reading)

When choosing your adaptation, you should consider:

1. Why this portion of the text—why is this particular moment one you wish to adapt?
2. What your adaptation will do—expand the original, revise it, tell it from a different point of view, change the genre (and so on)
3. What effect will your adaptation have on the source material? How does the theme change by changing the author’s intent? (Remember, the tone is a key to understanding the author’s intent—in this case YOU!)
4. What genre you want to choose to adapt the source text: playscript, graphic novel, lyric poem, short story, memoir, novel, confession… (You can choose to keep the original genre, but this should be a choice, not a default.) If you would like to use a particular genre but don’t know the “rules” for that genre, I am happy to help you.
5. What effect does the genre have on the source material? How does your choice material rely on its genre? How will your chosen genre allow you to say something different?

Part 2: Analyzing Your Adaptation: 1.5 Pages

Your Task: Explain and describe as objectively as possible your work and its relation to your source text. This analysis should reference the specific passages that inspire or engage your work, with an explanation of how you used the source text and what you did to transform it. To help you think this through, use these questions as a start:

• Why did you choose your source text? Why did you choose scene? (Was there a moment missing from it, a concept you wanted to expand, or a change you wanted to see in the original?)
• What is the impact of your adaptation? (How does it change, expand, or modify the source text’s meaning?)
• Why did you choose your medium? (How is your text particularly suited to play, graphic novel, short story, poem, etc.?)
• Use your knowledge of the “world” of a text from Elinor Fuch’s “Small Planet”(see uploaded reading) article: how does the “world” you have created function differently than the source text’s world?

Sources: Do not cite any sources.