All social media are stages: an intermedia perspective on literature-to-social-media adaptations

Abstract

Social media platforms continue to overtake an ever-greater share of our social, cultural, and artistic lives. As concerns literature specifically, more and more authors have begun to experiment in electing works from the literary canon (along with their characters, themes, symbols, and settings) as source media, transmediating them to social media, thereby inaugurating an entirely novel form of media product. The current paucity of research on the topic of literature-to-social-media adaptations provides an opportunity to fill a conspicuous gap in the fields of Literary, Adaptation and Intermedial Studies as they currently stand. In the present study, I apply the insights and theoretical framework of Intermedial and Adaptation Studies to this still-evolving phenomenon. A diachronic perspective on performances dealing with virtuality indicates that literature-to-social-media performances belong to a decades-long tradition. The corpus of adaptations investigated here restricts itself to literary sources in English, given that it is the lingua franca of the digital environment, transposed to social media within the period of 2010 to 2016. Although the period of 2010–2016 is a recent one, within the context of social media platforms it may in fact be considered an “early stage”, one which offers a glimpse at some of the very first attempts at literature-to-social-media adaptation. These early works include Such Tweet Sorrow, from 2010, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, from 2012, and #ShakespeareNoFilter, from 2016. Following a description of each of these productions, there is a plot summary, an explanation of the social media platform that works as the main stage for each performance, and an analysis of how other media were involved. Adaptations from literature to social media bear similarities to a canonized literary genre: that of the epistolary novel. Epistolary novels were a popular genre in the 18th century, and are fictional works mostly made up of written correspondence. For specific audiences, in a world where communicating via electronic correspondence is habitual, reading a story that develops through an exchange of emails, tweets, or watching it through a vlog may feel similar to reading a novel of letters once felt for eighteenth-century readers. Following Lars Elleström’s model for intermedial relations, this dissertation understands literature-to-social-media adaptations as a qualified media type. A synchronic perspective on Such Tweet Sorrow, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and #ShakespeareNoFilter reveals similarities in terms of media modalities. The most striking findings are related to the spatiotemporal modality. A thematic affinity is also identified: literature-to-social-media adaptations inspire critical perspectives on social media platforms.