Introduction

This blog is all about adaptations and representations in modernist literature. It is not just about the literal adaptations: versions of stage plays or book to film, but also about the forms shifting and adapting to their environment within the literature and how they are represented and their changing natures, such as the rejection of dead matter by Schulz in ‘A Treatise on Mannequins; or, The Second Book of Genesis’ or the mannequins in Jean Rhys’ ‘Mannequin’ rigidly conforming to the ‘type’ she was assigned to seeming more character than human.

Modernism lends itself particularly well to adaptations, from the many different ways that the plays of Alfred Jarry, Oskar Kokoschka, and Tristan Tzara to transforming the stories of Bruno Schulz into film. From the emergence of modernism in the theatre and its rejection of the traditional realist set design that the audiences were so comfortable with, modernism has been an exciting method to present place, space, and matter in new ways spanning many mediums.

In the theatre in particular, with the move from the classic box set, the boundaries were pushed and the comfortable boundaries between audience and performance were broken down to a point were it is sometimes unsure were they lie. Bruno Schulz’ fiction is praised for its rich narrative and incredible sense of place, but like the theatre it has an edge that takes it away from reality. Reading Schulz’ stories most of it could technically exist within the reality, but there is the sense of the surreal following it.