Borges’s “The Intruder” Remediated: Adaptation to Silver/Cyber Screens

Abstract

The present article is a critical scene for studying Ghazal 1975, an Iranian film by Masud Kimiai and Natalie Bookchin’s videogame, The Intruder 1999, both adapted from Borges’s short story, “The Intruder”. Exploiting Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (three modes of engagement in a story), the concentration is on showing how Borges’s story, as a telling mode (print), is remediated into showing (film) and interactive (video game). Ghazal exercises both fidelity criticism and appropriation regarding contextualization and adaptability, whereas The Intruder is a game of narration and interaction simultaneously, where the significance lies at studying the game’s “narrative mode” as a show case of Cyber Literature. The effort is aimed at scrutinizing how literary adaptations as forms of remediation are practically the manifestations of change in the storytelling narrative modes.