Resumen de Literature crossing borders: the reception of spanish literary works in the United States through film adaptations (1895-2018)
Studies examining the global circulation of cultural products have revealed that book translations form part of a vastly unequal system. Over half of the world’s books are translated from English, but very few are translated into English. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States. For the past decade, it has been cited that less than 3% of the books published in the U.S. are translations. A very similar trend occurs in the case of foreign films. Foreign films have consistently accounted for less than 5% of the United States’ yearly domestic market in the past few decades. The scarce presence of foreign literature and foreign films in the U.S. provides a very interesting illustration of the uneven flow of cultural products across international borders. It also highlights the similar role of these two transfer processes in the reception of foreign literature, a very promising new area of research.
This dissertation seeks to examine the reception of Spanish literature in the United States through film adaptations. To do this, frameworks from Polysystem Theory and sociological approaches are used for the development of a theoretical model that allows for the descriptive analysis of the object of study. This analysis is realized through the compilation and quantitative examination of three corpora. The first corpus draws upon existing resources to provide a comprehensive list of all film adaptations of Spanish literary works that have been made between 1895 and 2018. The second corpus seeks to determine which of these films have also been received in the United States. Finally, the third corpus limits the object of analysis to adaptations of literary works that have been received in the United States as both film adaptations and literary translations. This allows for the categorization of how film adaptation and literary translation combine in the reception of Spanish literature in the United States through film. A total of seven of these combinations are revealed. Each of these is then explored in detail through the qualitative analysis of seven case studies.
