'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', 'Little Vampire Women': is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery? At this month’s Walkley Media Conference we asked our panel to consider the ways in which ideas are 'recycled'. Below is a brief summary of their comments.
Panellists: Sophie Cunningham (author, editor & publisher), Malcolm Knox (journalist & author), Jess Scully (creative content maker) and Chris Warren (MEAA Federal Secretary)
The panel kicked off discussion with the slippery subject of the re-invention of a Jane Austen classic: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters…
Quirk Classics, a division of Philadelphia publishers Quirk Books, define their mission as being “to enhance classic novels with pop culture phenomena” and say that their books are “designed to be cleverly conceived, well-written, and entertainingly executed masterpieces that bring new fans to both classic works of literature and to original works of genre-based fiction.” Before the addition of sea monsters to Sense and Sensibility, Quirk Classics originally found success with their mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which made The New York Times best-seller list.
So, is bringing a new audience to Austen justification for such post-modern adpations?
Malcolm Knox thinks perhaps not. “I stand here as an old fashioned defender of property,” Knox said, “and Austen’s estate has a claim here.” Knox acknowledged that such spoofs are written “with tongue firmly in cheek", but he believes that regardless of what new twists or content are brought to a classic, such stories are intrinsically reliant on the fame of Austen’s original work. Without the original, "we could not appreciate the satire," he said.
Sophie Cunningham’s experience is that “as an author you are encouraged to repeat what you’ve done before.” Cunningham feels that the publishing industry is skewed toward repetition rather than originality, in the hopes of reproducing a tried and tested recipe for success. Cunningham also posed the question, in a post-modern world are there really any original stories?
“Originality is really a bit of intellectual conceit,” said Chris Warren. For the most part, the public “doesn’t really care” about the concept of originality, he said. Realistically, the idea of the author “has only existed for 300 years” prior to this, stories belonged to the cultural collective and were passed down orally generation by generation.
The panel also discussed ‘crowd sourcing’, which is being used more commonly as live Twitter feeds are displayed alongside news articles and leads are dug up online.
Jess Scully believes “we’ve moved past the idea of the ‘romanticised author’. We are heading back toward crowd sourced creativity.” “It’s the Britannica versus Wikipedia generation,” Scully explained, “We now expect to be able to comment on and co-edit online content.” Scully also made the point that television shows such as Family Guy and South Park “are built on pastiche with very flimsy plots.”
In this way, perhaps we are harking back to the communal roots of story telling. We are adding our own cultural twists to stories passed down the line until at the end, as in Chinese whispers, we find ourselves faced with Quirk Classics’ newest offering: Android Karenina!
You can view the full Hark! A Vagrant cartoon (A Little Austen Update pictured) here.
