Adaptation and amplification in Paul Auster's City of glass
- UNCW Author/Contributor (non-UNCW co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Cara Williams (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW )
- Web Site: http://library.uncw.edu/
- Advisor
- Meghan Sweeney
Abstract: Paul Auster’s meta-fictional detective story, City of Glass, involves a complex
linguistic investigation into the nature, function, and meaning of language. Using a
highly conventional literary genre, detective fiction, Auster, using deconstructionist
principles, carefully structures the collapse of these conventions, ultimately a signifying
structure, and with them the collapse of language.
Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli adapted from City of Glass a graphic novel,
Paul Auster’s City of Glass, extending Auster’s interrogation of signifying structures to
the signification of pictorial images. The novel offers a deliberate challenge to comics
theorists such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner who have made claims to the
universality and culturally transcendent meanings of pictorial images. This thesis argues
Karasik and Mazzucchelli establish the ambiguity of signification and the concept of
deferral and difference in pictorial images thus employing the conventions of comics to
collapse the signifying conventions of the comics genre and with it the collapse of comics
pictorial-based language.
Paul Auster’s City of Glass, I would like to suggest, creates an independently
viable text that brings Auster’s crisis of meaning full circle by indicating the ambiguity of
signification on multiple levels of representation whether spoken written or drawn.
Borrowing from Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation, this thesis explores the
relationship of the graphic adaptation to its source text in order to propose that, rather
than merely illustrating Auster’s text, Karasik and Mazzucchelli add resonance to
Auster’s work, creating a new text that can be interpreted and understood with no prior
knowledge of the source. At the same time, the adaptation lends validity and value to
iv
alternate cultural forms such as graphic novels and adaptations, both of which have been
historically marginalized in English studies.
Adaptation and amplification in Paul Auster's City of glass
PDF (Portable Document Format)
1259 KB
Created on 1/1/2009
Views: 17369
Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
- Language: English
- Date: 2009
- Keywords
- Auster Paul 1947-City of glass--Criticism and interpretation, Karasik Paul, Hutcheon Linda 1947-Theory of adaptation--Criticism and interpretation, Mazzucchelli David
- Subjects
- Auster, Paul, 1947- City of glass -- Criticism and interpretation
- Hutcheon, Linda, 1947- Theory of adaptation -- Criticism and interpretation
- Karasik, Paul
- Mazzucchelli, David