'Much of the discussion of film adaptation quietly reinscribes the axiomatic superiority of literary art to film, an assumption derived from a number of superimposed prejudices: seniority, the assumption that a older arts are necessarily better arts; iconophobia, the culturally rooted prejudice (traceable to the Judaic-Muslim-Protestant prohibitions on “graven images” and the Platonic and Neoplatonic depreciation of the world of phenomenal appearance) that visual arts are necessarily inferior to the verbal arts; and logophilia, the converse valorization, characteristic of the “religions of the book,” of the “sacred word” of holy texts.
Stucturalist and poststructuralist theoretical developments, meanwhile, indirectly undermine some of these prejudices in ways that have implications for our discussion of adaptation. The structuralist semiotics of the 1960s and 1970s treated all signifying practices as productive of “texts” worthy of the same close attention as literary texts. The Bakhtinian “translinguistic” conception of the author as the orchestrator of preexisting discourses, meanwhile, along with Foucault's downgrading of the author in favor of a pervasive anonymity of discourse, opened the way to a “discursive” and nonoriginary approach to all arts. With poststructuralism the figure of the author, rather like the Robin Williams character in Deconstructing Harry, loses focus and firmness. Derridean deconstruction, meanwhile, by dismantling the hierarchy of “original” and “copy,” suggests that both are caught up in the “original.” And if authors are fissured, fragmented, multidicursive, hardly “present” even to themselves, how can an adaptation communicate the “self-presence” of auhorial intention? In the same vein, Roland Barthe’s provocative leveling of the hierarchy between literary criticism and literature tends, by analogy, to rescue the film adaptation as a form of criticism or “reading” of the novel, one not necessarily subordinate to the source novel.'
Robert Stam, 'The Dialogics of Adaptation', in Film Adaptation, edited by James Neremore, publisher: Rutgers University Press