New Comparative Literature and Literary Adaptation: Williams's Glass Menagerie and Tavakoli's Here without Me

Adaptation studies finds its way as an authorized discipline in the realm of comparative literature. This paper scrutinizes Tavakoli’s reading of Glass Menagerie in the course of adaptation. Though adaptation is a literal reading of an already existing text, it’s a new cultural product rather than a byproduct. Through the lens of interdisciplinarity, comparative literature and adaptation studies break the boundaries of literature and cinema, written and multimedia texts, the canons and the popular literature. Thus, not only the text but also the context is of great importance. Hence, the adaptation of Glass Menagerie (Williams, 1945) as Here without Me (dir. Tavakoli, 2011) is not evaluated according to its fidelity to Williams’s text. This paper studies Tavakoli’s creative interpretation of Glass Menagerie, adapted as a film in Iran of the early 2010s.