This may be because this relationship strains the limits of what viewers expect from a film adaptation of a known literary work. Given the many references, it may seem surprising that no sustained analyses of the connections between Jaws ( Citation1975) and An Enemy of the People have been published.

While the connections with Herman Melville’s 1851 novel have been examined in the scholarly and critical literature (Biskind Citation1975 Torry Citation1993 Dowling Citation2014 Robinson Citation2016 Buck Citation2018), the uses Spielberg made of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama En Folkefiende ( An Enemy of the People) have been largely unexplored, despite frequent (if passing) references in both the critical reception of Spielberg’s film (Malcolm Citation1975 Andrews Citation1999 Nærø Citation2008 French Citation2012) and scholarship on Ibsen’s play (Rønning Citation2000 Wærp Citation2007 Engelstad Citation2010). The authors propose viewing adaptation as a process that necessarily includes the audience’s understanding of hypotext and hypertext in ways that influence meaning production it invites consideration of the source text in the film’s reception, consequently linking the source text and its author to other cultural and social discourses that, in turn, influence their reception reflexively in light of the adaptation.Īccording to screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, he and Steven Spielberg “always referred to Jaws as Moby-Dick meets An Enemy of the People” (Baer Citation2008, 204). The authors reference other cinematic engagements with the same play, including Hans Steinhoff’s Ein Volksfeind (1937), Detlef Sierck’s La Habanera (1937), George Schaefer’s An Enemy of the People (1978), Satyajit Ray’s Ganashatru (1989), and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s En folkefiende (2005), as they investigate the importance of polysemic allegorical structures, the inherently “dialectical” nature of the process of adaptation, the role of reception in newer theories of adaptation, and the implications of understanding adaptation as a particular film genre. In this article the authors discuss Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) with Henrik Ibsen’s En Folkefiende ( An Enemy of the People 1882) as a test case for formulating a better theoretical understanding of adaptations that are neither “announced” nor “extended” the analysis thus explores adaptation as a special form of intertextuality.

Jaws pdf creator keygen