Literary Adaptations: Remixing and Upcycling

Third Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies St. Louis University

St. Louis, MO

June 15–17, 2015 http://smrs.slu.edu/

Organizers:
Please feel free to email with any questions.

Kristina Sutherland
Department of Comparative Literature University of Georgia krsuthe@uga.edu

Tara Chambers
Department of English University of Saskatchewan tac598@mail.usask.ca

Deadline for abstracts: 250­300 word proposals due by 15 December 2014

Description:
Modern productions of classic literature have created new intersections between past and present. Recent productions on­ and off­stage of Shakespeare have employed swimming pools, balloons, discothèques, and silly string. Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, has inspired an “electronic opera” and a musical adaptation. The Siglo de Oro Spanish Drama Festival at Chamizal National Memorial Park regularly includes classic plays “updated” to twentieth­-century settings and adaptations of non­dramatic literature. Medieval and Renaissance drama festivals have also included new drama which employs old comedies, either compiling texts into one story or creating a new story which references specific scenes.

This panel seeks submissions that discuss such “remixing” and “upcycling” of Medieval and Early Modern literature on stage, in film, or on the page, and how they reinvent, refashion, or even reform the source material for twentieth­ and twenty­first­century audiences. We invite proposals for papers regarding adaptations from scholars at all levels (graduate students and faculty) that address the connections created by more modern “updates” of Medieval and Early Modern literature.

Possible topics include, but aren’t limited to:

• ●  Works which update Medieval or Early Modern literature to twentieth­ or twenty­first­century

  settings, such as Shakespeare in Joss Whedon’s backyard

• ●  Works which include or are comprised of multiple works
• ●  Works which make use of Medieval or Early Modern plots, characters, or dialogue in new

  ways

• ●  Works which add anachronistic touches, such as rap or rock and roll
• ●  Works which reimagine the text through a new background story or ending, such as the use of

  Beowulf in the 2008 Outlander

• ●  Works which revise Medieval or Early Modern literature for political purposes, such as

  Laurence Olivier’s Henry V