Abstract

Adaptation raises frequently recurring general questions, one of which is, as we know, the great motif of ‘fidelity.’ We have chosen this motif to begin our discussion because it is in a sense the ‘blind spot’ of every approach to adaptation. We will see, however, that this question of fidelity deserves to be downplayed and neutralised by being much less subjective about it than usual. We know that the way in which the question of fidelity was posed until recently was simply not well suited to a theoretical discussion of the problem of adaptation. Hence the temptation, to which several scholars have succumbed since the 1980s, to kick it out of the field of adaptation studies at any price. ²