M/C Journal 'adapt' Issue Launched

I'm happy to announce the launch of issue 10.2 of M/C Journal (not 10.1, as some of my announcement emails earlier today had it, unfortunately) - as some early readers have commented already, this is a particularly strong issue; congratulations to the editors and authors involved.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 7 May 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue two in volume ten of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'adapt' - Edited by Patrick West and Jeannette Delamoir

'Adapt' immediately suggests the artistic notion of adaptation: reworking a work of art across the boundaries of media, audience, and context of presentation. But once shaken loose from its attachment to this narrowly artistic formulation of adaptation, adapt seems to structure virtually all aspects of our biological and cultural selves. Darwinism holds that an organism - over millennia - adapts new forms and behaviours in order to survive, while the business of global and technological living demands a sort of accelerated Darwinism on a scale of minutes and moments. We adapt into something, but what is it that we adapt from? Does stripping back the layers of adaptation ever uncover something not itself just another adaptation? And why is this (fiction of the) original so often given precedence over the simulacrum, the copy, the adaptation? Adapt sutures the poles of such cultural hierarchies.

Adapt also plunges us into the mystery of creativity itself, fracturing the illusion of originality to precisely the degree that it presupposes layers of difference infiltrating the universe's 'steady state'. Postmodern circumstances such as cyborg existence - a combinatorial difference -depend upon just such a concept of adapt, which brings things together without forfeiting entirely what tends to keep them apart. The ethics of adapt might be found in the way it opens the whole gamut of culture up to difference. For when it comes right down to it, isn't 'to adapt' the slogan of everything? Thought, writing, art: these seem inevitably products of adaptation, to the extent that an infinity of previous instantiations must always be assumed. All thought proceeds from previous thought, all writing from previous writing, and no art is ever born ex nihilo.

If we have learned just one thing from the experience of editing the M/C Journal 'adapt' issue, it is that our theme richly rewards the sort of intellectual and creative activity demonstrated by our contributors.

Feature Article
"In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production"
- Linda Hutcheon

Building on the story of Beatrice Cenci and its many adaptations throughout literary history, Linda Hutcheon mounts a defence of adaptation, and examines the impact that such multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. She notes that the storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism - whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen.

Articles

"Adaptation and the Art of Survival"
- Sergio Rizzo

"Agency in Adaptation"
- Michelle McMerrin

"Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in
Adaptation"
- Lexey A. Bartlett

"'To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious': The Adaptation of Hip Hop
Graffiti to an Australian Context"
- Kara-Jane Lombard

"From British 'Pride' to Indian 'Bride': Mapping the Contours of a
Globalised (Post?)Colonialism"
- Suchitra Mathur

"Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One"
- Deborah Allison

"Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento"
- Ilana Shiloh

"Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past"
- Steve Collins

"Subverting the 'Good, Old Tune': Carlos Saura's Carmen"
- Ioana Furnica

"Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop
(Soundtracks)"
- Kevin P. Eubanks

"Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque"
- Debra Ferreday

"Adapting to a New Identity: Reconstituting the Self as a Heart Patient"
- Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface and Tami McMahon

"Adapting a Model of Duration: The Multitemporality of T_Visionarium II"
- Tim Barker

"The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today"
- J.D. Connor

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Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2007:

'complex': article deadline 4 May 2007, release date 27 June 2007
'home': article deadline 29 June 2007, release date 22 August 2007
'error': article deadline 24 August 2007, release date 17 October 2007
'vote': article deadline 19 October 2007, release date 12 December 2007

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M/C Journal 10.2 is now online: <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>.
Previous issues of M/C Journal on various topics are also still available.

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Visit all four M/C publications at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.

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All contributors are available for media contacts: mc@media-culture.org.au.

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