Appropriating, Modernizing, or Localizing? Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice on Turkish TV
摘要
Contemporary serial Turkish TV productions have been severely attacked for churning out mere ‘copies’ of foreign originals, in some cases using even the same titles in their translated versions, but not necessarily acknowledging their original source material. Accordingly, in most cases, such productions are consumed without the awareness of their intertextual status. Since the early days of its inception, Adaptation Studies has tackled the issue of what constitutes an adaptation and, as Leitch asks, “[i]f an audience misses the intertextual reference of a particular adaptation, does it still count as an adaptation?” (95). What is more, scholars have long debated over the boundaries—or the lack thereof—among adapting, appropriating, rewriting, modernizing, and localizing. Yet, as Murray contends, “[a]dapted texts may be interesting, […] not so much for their intricate ideological encodings, but for the way they illuminate the contexts of their own production” (5). Viewed from this perspective, the adaptation implies more about its own context than shedding any new light on its bygone source text. Within this framework, this chapter analyzes adaptations of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) for Turkish television, namely through two series, Asi (2007) and Aşk ve Gurur (2017). Also embedded in this analysis is the inevitable difference between production mechanisms of film and of television. To this end, the aim is to question how the dynamics of the adaptive process get shaped according to specific discourses and how adaptation works in the case of localization, as well as assessing the impact on Turkish TV production.