Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research
In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning concerning the memory tasks required for this kind of perception and experimental work showing neuronal, psychological and perceptual specificities contrasting acts of reception of artistic and non artistic stimuli. A particularly promising arena for model building research lies in poetic language and rhetorical structures of repetition. Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas, "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in the Empirical Research of Literary Texts" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.2 (2016) <http:/docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss2/4> Thematic Issue New Work in the Empirical Study of Literature. Ed. Aldo Nemesio Marion BEHRENS, Christian KELL, and Pascal NICKLAS Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in the Empirical Research of Literary Texts Literary history holds many examples of adaptation. Harold Bloom distinguished in his 1973 The Anxiety of Influence between "weak" poets succumbing to the force of influence by the poetry they had read and "strong" poets producing original poetry. Making the case for "strong" poets and their originality, the model also testifies to the power of influence in poetic imagination. The term "influence" has lost some of its shine and significance in the decades of poststructuralist poetics while it formerly signified the foundational idea of a whole methodological branch of comparative literature: influence studies were one of the earliest fields where studies in comparative literature could claim a specific competence (see, e.g. Corbineau Hoffmann; Balakian; Block) Literary history based on the concept of influence hinged on the importance of the historical and psychological entity of the author. In turn, scholars employing poststructuralist approaches did away with the author figure to a large extent arguing for Roland Barthes's 1967 (misunderstood) concept of the "death of the author" where originality was no longer an important category characterizing literary merit. Next, intertextuality became the predominant model of literary poetics and aesthetics pushing authorship into the background and Linda Hutcheon's and Siobhan O'Flynn's notion in A Theory of Adaptation of interconnectivity suggests of (not only literary) texts, but that adaptation is a creative product and process in which earlier works are revisited in later works. This mode of production meets a mode of reception in which the pleasure of reading derives from the recognition and reflection of the adaptation as adaptation. Just like a repetition is only a repetition for recipients when they become aware that what they are just reading has been read before (see Lobsien 15) an adaptation becomes only perceptible as such when the recipient is aware of the revisionary character of the respective work and has sufficient knowledge of the prior work to permit comparison. Only the recognition of the former work in the new work makes the latter an adaptation in terms of reception. This anagnorisis is the cardinal point which motivates recipients to encounter the same work of art repeatedly in its new vestiges. The incessant reiterations of myth in oral culture and the repeatability of readings in literary cultures indicate the importance of adaptations for recipients. Hence, the poetics and aesthetics of adaptation suggests a perceptional and physiological dimension of this trait in aesthetic behavior. Empirical aesthetics in the study of literature is by definition restricted to research into modes of reception because the production side is covered by poetics. Creativity, however, is not the sole feature of poetics because models of reader response theory have rightly stressed the importance of the reader's activity in the creation of textual meaning (see Schrott und Jacobs 494) The effect of the aesthetic stimulus is dependent on the subjective dispositions, creative abilities as well as the reading and viewing listening habits and the experiences of the recipient. Empirical aesthetic research into adaptation, therefore, concentrates on the recipient who establishes an adaptation as adaptation by the recognition of the adaptation as a revision of a former work. While the institutional origin of adaptation studies lies in the field of literature on screen (see Cartmell and Whelehan) recent work in adaptation studies has stressed the multimedia, inter art, and inter media character of adaptations in the age of media convergence and participatory culture (see Bruhn, Gjelsvik, Hanssen; Nicklas and Voigts) In terms of comparative literature, adaptation studies represent a new approach in influence studies because the underlying conception of authorship in the former is outdated and because the aesthetic implications of the latter are replaced by a concept of mediality. New methodology makes new questions possible including the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neuroscience allows for a better spatial resolution in brain mapping and its functional inferences. Together with the electroencephalogram (EEG) which has a better temporal resolution, functional imaging permits the identification of neural correlates of subjective reactions to artistic and literary stimuli. However, as empirical aesthetics is not identical with neuro aesthetics (see Chatterjee) there is an array of other empirical means such as like questionnaires, gaze analyses, and the physiology laboratory underlining new approaches to emotional and cognitive reactions. The availability of the technical resources has improved over the past years. While empirical aesthetics used to be a marginalized field in psychology (see Allesch) there are numerous international interdisciplinary groups working on problems of aesthetics usually including psychological expertise. Recent research into the aesthetics of adaptation involves experiments where cognitive and technical expertise comes from psychology and neuroscience expertise while research in aesthetics is contributed by scholars in the humanities. This is combined with the at times speculative theoretical background of evolutionary biology. For a model of the aesthetics of adaptation this involves an attempt to find out why the recognition of adaptations as adaptations is pleasurable. We argue that this will be answered by an evolutionary biological reasoning explaining the function of the specific act of recognition by relying on a certain performance of memory and that evolutionarily reasoning represents and advantage to structure incoming sensory data and to sort patterns according to their relevance and familiarity. Increasing familiarity with specific structures facilitates faster processing and more efficient decision making. Memory and learning strategies play a key role in this scenario: for example, the effect of the pathological narrowing of the perceptual horizon is observable in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The degeneration of the hippocampus entails a reduced power to consolidate fresh memories. The reaction to new contexts becomes difficult while familiar contexts allow patients to simulate normal behavior for some time depending on the progression of the degenerative process. Recognition of an adaptation as adaptation is a two step task of memory. The first step is the establishment of a pattern through reading the "original." The next step is the processing of the data in the act of perceiving the adaptation and then connecting it to the memories of the "original." Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas, "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in the Empirical Research of Literary Texts" page 3 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.2 (2016) <http:/docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss2/4> Thematic Issue New Work in the Empirical Study of Literature. Ed. Aldo Nemesio The brain's biological evolution is not concomitant with the evolution of cultural faculties: abilities like reading or calculation have developed with great speed and have become socially important in a historical frame of time which is too narrow to leave any trace in the genome. This means that certain features of the brain have developed before the introduction of cultural practices which require brain activity and connectivity. This has the effect that cultural skills change the biology of the brain by taking over areas which were originally formed for different tasks. Inversely, however, it also means that the brain's structure influences how culture can manifest itself. Stanislas Dehaene suggests that "we should stop thinking of human culture as a distinctly social layer, free to vary without bounds, independent of our biological endowment" and that, on the contrary, "cultural inventions such as writing are only possible inasmuch as they fit within our pre existing brain architecture" "Inside" <http:/dana.org/Cerebrum/Default.aspx?id=39494> Hence there is reciprocity in the relationship of biology and culture which has its limits where physiology does not budge (see Miall and Kuiken, "The Form" 331) Dehaene summarized his own and his colleagues' research making important points about the interdependency of biology and culture arguing that the neural correlates of the aesthetics of adaptation are the mechanisms of neural recyc