The Evolution of Broadway Musical Entertainment, 1850--2009: Interlingual and Intermedial Interference

Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory (1978, revised 1990) postulates that translated literature occupies a central location in a young literature and serves an "innovative" function until the literature matures, at which time translated literature is pushed to the periphery and is "conservative" (approximating the native repertoire). Using a "distant reading" approach (Moretti 2005), this project explores the position of both translated and adapted literature in the evolution of Broadway musical entertainment. Using an original database of more than four thousand productions of musical entertainment from professional New York playhouses associated with the history of Broadway from 1850 through 2009, various waves of interlingual and intermedial interference are graphed and discussed. This project calls for a return to analyzing literary transfer between systems to compare and contrast interference between various cultural-linguistic systems and media systems.