ABSTRACT
Translations, adaptations, appropriations, and remakes transform, change, and vary existing cultural material. So do other forms of ‘chronological’ or ‘genealogical’ intertextuality or intermediality or interarts in a diachronic perspective, such as allusions, parodies, pastiches, imitations, rewritings, mashups, remixes, samples, prequels, sequels, and – in the arts – montage, collage, and assemblage. Illegal intertextuality is called plagiarism or fake – for artistic purposes, we speak of fake art. Originality, it seems, is an innovative form of transforming existing material. Culture is produced via a reshaping of existing culture. We might address these cultural processes by using verb-derived nouns (adapting, transforming, remaking, remixing) in a sense quite distinct from the nouns denoting a rather more specific genre (adaptation, transformation, remake, remix). Whenever the synchronic dimension needs to be highlighted, researchers prefer the term transmediality. In sum, we might speak of the poly-processes of artistic production, all of them adaptive, derivative, and appropriative in character.
