Epilogue

In his book Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox, Daniel Varndell reminds us that “One cannot watch a film for the first time twice” (5). In every subsequent reading or viewing of a book, film, play, or work of art, the text will always be a figure of adaptation, since stories change over time in our personal and cultural imagination, even without an “adapter” there as a catalyst for such evolution. The changes in the individual and cultural reception of a work suggest that agency in the process of adaptation is shared and shifting, just as the identity of a text shifts as it is read, viewed, and performed differently over time. The broad view of adaptation this study has argued for embraces the vast potential in adapting stories, which are always already rewritten by virtue of changing reception habits, practices, and desires. Meeting that potential depends upon the openness of readers, viewers, art-goers, audience members, and creative artists to the changing—often radically mutating—emphases in the content and form of texts and media.