Adapting the Screenplay Novel: "Interior Chinatown" from Page to Screen
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a 2020 novel using the narrative structure of a screenplay as it tells a story of Willis Wu, a self-proclaimed “Generic Asian Man” who strives to become a “Kung Fu Guy.” Written almost entirely in screenplay format, Yu’s novel uses cinematic conventions such as camera directions, scene headings, staged dialogue, and typecast roles to view the protagonist not just as a character, but as both performer and narrative construct within a racialized media system, and to comment on the portrayal of hypervisibility and simultaneous invisibility of Asian American experience in mainstream media. Drawing on the studies in adaptation theory and intermediality, particularly the concept of intermedial reference, this paper compares the intermedial literary techniques of the novel with the visual strategies of the TV adaptation, and further examines how the Hulu TV adaptation of Interior Chinatown retains and reinvents the novel’s filmic narrative structure in its translation to a visual medium while addressing the East-West cultural dialogue at the heart of the story. Facing the challenge of dramatizing an already “cinematized” narrative while preserving the meta-commentary on representation, the focus will be put on how the TV adaptation preserves the novel’s reflexivity and the play between the “show” and “reality” so as to convey Willis Wu’s journey from the background character to the main protagonist of his own life. Interior Chinatown becomes not just a story of assimilation or resistance, but a hybridized narrative form that mirrors the hybridity of its protagonist’s experience, one that is both shaped by and critical of Western media. |
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