This panel seeks to situate current vibrant interest in re-working canonical texts within crises of our moment. What work can contemporary writers and artists do with earlier canonical literature to challenge legacies of settler colonialism, environmental exploitation, capitalist consumption, anti-Black-violence, and religious intolerance? Using precursors accords value to the previous iteration, a kind of conservation that can seem (and can sometimes be) backward-looking. But adapting prior texts also puts them to new uses, making them a resource for a present they did not predict. Can adaptations also offer a way to undo the past? The panel seeks to engage these questions, and move beyond them, by queering temporal relations: by considering polychronic, branched, and suspended timelines along lines suggested by the adaptation theories of Sanders, Hutcheon, Garneau, and Lanier. Each of our 15-minute papers explores, in various and overlapping permutations, ways to work, re-work, and play with texts of early modern English literature, modern science fiction, and contemporary serial television.

Scott Black explores the multi-modal volume Always Coming Home (1985) by Ursula K. Le Guin, who was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress in 2000 and received the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Service to American Letters in 2014. Black studies the text as an adaptation of indigenous “Californian” cultures, utopian fiction, and Daoism. He argues that Le Guin uses these far-flung traditions in a complex, spiraling, and rhizomatic work about a complex, spiraling, and rhizomatic culture in an imagined post-apocalyptic future re-grounded in sustainable cultural practices. The paper shows Le Guin mapping a possible future by returning to some dark and buried modes of storytelling.

Also focusing on Le Guin, Marissa Greenberg explores the author’s novella “Paradises Lost.” Le Guin’s science-fiction reworking of John Milton’s Paradise Lost returns to humanity’s journey -- clear but not direct, collective yet also individual -- from a mythic prelapsarian universe, through the fall and expulsion from Eden, to eternal salvation or damnation. Reimagining this journey in the context of interstellar travel toward a new Eden, Le Guin puts Milton’s queer temporalities to new purpose. Repetition and revolution coexist uneasily in “Paradises Lost,” Greenberg argues, to throw into relief not only tensions between scientific and religious ontologies but also the vulnerability of particular bodies within these ways of being in time.

Lauren Shohet turns to HBO’s current television series Succession to investigate the question of looping, recursive repetition within works drawing on prior texts. Exposing the vacuum at the heart of late capitalism, when nothing seems to mean anything, Succession stages the failure of cause/effect, before/after, when what appear to be plot arcs of succession to power repeat, with no incremental changes-- hereby repeating the repetitions of Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV. At the beginning and end of capitalism, Shakespeare and Succession explore the tension at the heart of patriarchy: the essential power of the patriarch coupled with the demand that he be replaceable by the next patriarch. Shohet draws out homologies between the operations of patriarchy and the operations of adaptative reuse, arguing that the dynamic fertility attendant upon the breakdown of authoritative lineage in the creative realm might provide models in the political world for recycling the ruins of patriarchy into something new.

Belinda Deneen Wallace also explores intermedial reworking. Extending the kinds of adaptation the panel explores, Wallace takes up the 2020 HBO television series Lovecraft Country, which evokes the early-twentieth-century author H. P. Lovecraft -- but only, in the words of novelist Matt Ruff, on whose work the series was based, “through the back door” – as what Ruff calls a “thematic bridge between paranormal horror and the horrors of racism.” Focusing on the character Hippolyta as a conduit to raze the horrors of racism, the paper suggests transformative ways that queer temporality allows us to rethink how Black bodies love, labor, engage, and engender their humanity. When Lovecraft Country’s Hippolyta names herself, this remixes our consciousness and perspectives on the meaning(s) of Blackness—past, present, and future--signaling a necessary reidentification outside dominant racialized ways of being.

As a whole, then, the panel plumbs re-workings of the sort Wallace identifies in Lovecraft Country as ways to confront crises that differentially affect oppressed populations. From the perspectives of different media, genres, periods, and adaptive models, we consider relations of source texts and imaginative responses within a frame of uncertainty, precarity, and play that invite us to imagine "what next?" and "what if?”