Author – text – director – viewer: reception models and meaning-making strategies in the film discourse of little women

Abstract

Traditional adaptation theory treats the film director as a relatively neutral mediator who transfers literary meaning onto the screen, which simplifies the actual communicative structure of the act of adaptation. The article proposes an extended four-part communicative model of film discourse – “author – text – director – viewer” – combining the narratological category of the implied author with the reception-aesthetic categories of the horizon of expectation and the implied reader/viewer. The director is treated as an independent communicative instance, a “reading author” who simultaneously occupies the position of a real reader of the literary source and the creator of a new implied author of the film text, who in turn constructs an implied viewer. The model is tested on four English-language film adaptations of L.M. Alcott's novel Little Women (1933, 1949, 1994, 2019). Based on comparative analysis, a typology of directorial meaning-making strategies is proposed – reproductive, decorative-escapist, actualizing and metafictional – reflecting a consistent increase in reflexive distance between the source text and the film text over nearly a century. The findings provide deeper insight into the role of directorial interpretation in transforming literary narratives and demonstrate how historical and cultural contexts shape meaning-making strategies, audience reception, and film adaptation