The history of adaptation either in theory or in practice has been detailed by many renowned writers whose adaptation criticism can be classified into two categories: one is an essentialist method that is loyal to their original sources; and one is a polysemic approach that is basically independent yet remains ambiguous relationship from those sources. In the latter case, George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957) evaluates the film on its own achievement that is entirely free from any connections to the literary source. Siegfried Kracauer’s contemporaneous Theory of Film starts with the extensive statement, “This study rests upon the assumption that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others” (4). More recently, Seymour Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa)” attacks on the essentialist view and he considers that novels and films are suited basically different tasks. Brian McFarlane, in his Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, follows Bluestone to consider that the study of adaptation should “consider to what extent the film-maker has picked up visual suggestions from the novel in his representations of key verbal signs—and how the visual representation affects one’s ‘reading’ of the film text” (24).

All of these critics seem to search for a polysemic approach to argue that a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptation is unattainable and theoretically impossible since films and novels are separate media. Thus, adaptation studies propose to invoke authorial intention as a possible regulatory function for both the verbal and the visual. In other words, the authorial originality has remained as a central position in adaptation study since all texts are intertexts that rely on their interpretation on shared assumptions about language, culture, narrative, and conventions. More specially, Chatman details that “film cannot reproduce many of the pleasures of reading novels, but it can produce other experiences of parallel value” (52). Chatman’s “parallel value” releases the responsibility of slavish imitation to its source and replaces it with the possibility of parallel experiences. Likewise, Robert Stam notes, “The literary text is not closed, but an open structure . . . to be reworked by a boundless context. The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through ever-shifting grids of interpretation” (57). Thus, a concept of the text as a site of multiple meanings and readings, and the modernist texts are to be designed, in Barthes’s terms, as writerly texts. While Stam’s approach is beneficial in escaping from an impressionistic fidelity reading, Judith Mayne’s Private Novel, Public Film (1988) and William Ferrell’s Literature and Film as Modern Mythology (2000) both exemplify a fruitful approach to adapt an original text on the level of cultural/historical references that may be more or less adjusted to reflect contemporary realities. In both works, the issue of fidelity of adaptation is a non-issue; instead these books focus on the use of space and the employment of myth. Similarly, an extended example of a polysemic reading of both original novels and adaptations is shown in Linda Mizejewski’s 1992 study Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles.