Articulations in Translation at the Intersection of World Literature and Popular Culture: Film and TV Adaptations of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

From World Literature to Popular Culture

With the rapid development of globalization and new media technologies, the last two decades have witnessed the opening of a more pluralistic global literary space in which voices from and about the peripheries have been widely heard and appreciated. Discussions of world literature have increasingly attracted attention as scholars seek further understanding of this new literary space. Scholars such as David Damrosch have extended the concept of "world literature" as literature circulates beyond its "culture of origin" (4), and shifted the emphasis from the literariness of a text to a set of relationships including its production, circulation, and translation (6). This shift blurs the boundaries between historically mainstream and non-mainstream works; as Damrosch points out, instead of "works," world literature becomes "a network" (3). That is to say, when we look at a work, we need to know how it engages with its literary tradition of origin as well as with other literary traditions into which it has entered. This phenomenological approach underscores the travels of literature via translation, as well as other modes of interpretation such as "allusion, pastiche, parody and adaptation in another medium" (Eco 6). Translation enables the "international reception" (Venuti 180) of a work, and contributes to the "literary fame" (Lefevere 2) of the writer.

Film and TV adaptations are forms of cross-medium translation. In the increasingly globalized entertainment and media landscape, with the developments in media technology and the growing power of visual representation, film has played an increasingly greater role in the local and global circulation of literature. Ian McEwan's reception in China is a particularly illuminating example. When McEwan's novel Atonement was first translated into Chinese in 2005, it garnered very little attention, despite his status in the West; it was not until 2008, when the award-winning film adaptation of Atonement, featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in mainland China, that the novel became popular among Chinese readers (Liu). While accelerating the spread and reception of a literary work, film and TV adaptations also bring the work into the field of popular culture.

In cultural studies, the term "popular culture" has numerous definitions; for the purposes of this paper, rather than determining whether an adaptation is liked by many, I focus on the mechanisms behind the adaptation and circulation processes. To avoid dichotomy and reductionism, I draw on the post-Marxist view of popular culture as a "terrain" in which cultural practice is neither "imposed" by the "dominant group" nor "spontaneously oppositional" from "the people", but "is a terrain of exchange and negotiation between the two […] marked by resistance and incorporation" (Storey 10).

At the intersection of world literature and popular culture, film and TV adaptations can be regarded as vessels for the travel of literature, and as cultural practices that contain both the power of "resistance and incorporation" (Storey 10). This paper examines the British film adaptation and the Japanese TV adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, asking the following questions: what changes are made in different adaptations? How do these changes relate to the concepts of resistance and incorporation? In addition to the aesthetic choices of the screenwriters and directors, which factors influence these changes? While studies of translations and adaptations from a cultural perspective generally focus on comparisons between the literary systems and ideologies of the source and target texts, adopting such an analytical framework for the discussion of film and TV adaptations risks overlooking the global context and commercial appeal of these adaptations. The interaction, negotiation, and hybridization of these factors may lead to one-sided conclusions when tracing borders between them; therefore, this paper follows the post-Marxist concept of articulation.

Stuart Hall's Concept of Articulation

The word articulation has existed for centuries before cultural studies; it has various meanings in different contexts, and all of them imply a kind of "joining of parts to make a unity" (Slack 115). The concept of...