Reading the Novelization: Traces of Adaptation

Novelization has received increasing academic attention in the past decade, resulting in a number of exploratory critical studies that have mapped this type of adaptation as a cultural phenomenon. In this paper, though, I would like to focus on a few key narratological features of commercial novelizations, which are typically regarded as nothing more than lowbrow popular novels yet may perhaps illuminate the larger intermedial framework between cinema and literature (and other media). I will discuss how traces of a film trickle into its novelization, which then adjusts those filmic aspects and re-integrates them into its own medium. In order to sketch out this tension between filmic specificity, the adaptation of that filmic logic and the specific characteristics of the literary medium, I will concentrate on three facets that are an apparent staple of traditional adaptation study discourses, namely the simultaneity of cinema vs the linearity of literature, the neutral camera eye vs the narrator’s internal focalization and summary vs elaboration. I will show how the commercial novelization blurs those boundaries between media while at the same time exposing its own medium-specificity. My analysis is based on detailed textual examples from a variety of novelizations such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Short Circuit, The X-Files and Attack of the Clones.status: publishe