Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh, editors. The Pedagogy of Adaptation. Scarecrow, 2010. 183 pp.

Abstract

The editors of this collection of papers deserve congratulations for creating
a valuable, ground-breaking resource for teaching adaptation at the university
level. It represents a timely intervention in adaptation studies, written from the
teachers’ point of view. It is ground-breaking in the sense that, at the time of
its first publication, it was the first collection dedicated solely to the pedagogy
of adaptation. More than anything, it provides explanation on why adaptation
studies should be taught as a separate discipline, like film studies are. With contributors
from different areas of education within the United States, the collection
offers a wide range of essays treating adaptation from different points of
view. Starting with the introduction dedicated to the rationale behind teaching
adaptation as well as its use in the classroom, The Pedagogy of Adaptation highlights
the fact that adaptation is a creative process in which the source text,
although it doubtless is an inspiration, ceases to be the focus, along with fidelity,
now widely contested as the least relevant of adaptation’s features.