Shall we tell it again? speech genres, adaptation, and cultural memory in Spider-Man movies

Abstract

It aims to analyze the role of memory and cultural memory in the adaptation process between and within discursive genres in the superhero movies market. As corpus of analysis we selected three adaptations of the comic book character Spider-Man: Spider-Man, from 2002; The Amazing Spider-Man, from 2012 and Spider-Man, Homecoming, from 2017. As a theoretical framework, we will work with Bakhtin (1997) who understands speech genres as a group of self-identical utterances; Assmann (2011), Erll (2010) and Heller (2003) to conceptualize cultural memory, seen as a construction arising from the traces that come from cultural works; Hutcheon (2013), who understands adaptation as a process that builds something new; and Todorov (2013) in his idea of the tension between difference and repetition in elaboration of storytellings. Methodologically, we will use Vanoye and Goliot-Lété (2011), with the idea of construction of meaning through filmic fragments. We conclude that adaptation uses memory as an element of the utterance construction process, being fundamental in the production of the cultural industries products and its dynamics of difference and repetition for the cultural memory production.