Emma in a pop world

How the film Clueless reproduces Jane Austen's irony

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how irony, a concept that is so well known to researchers of the writer Jane Austen, is shown in the Hollywood film Clueless (1999), which can be considered as an analogy to the work Emma (1789), based on the discussion about adaptations and its types in the book Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996), by Brian McFarlane. Despite not being considered an adaptation itself, seeing as how there are no credits for Jane Austen, the film Clueless has parallels with the universe of Emma's story, whether in the description of the characters, or in the sagacious and confident personality of the main character Cher. Concerning the use of irony in text,  an adaptation of a Jane Austen's novel may contain traits of this resource, however, in Clueless, it is possible to observe that there is not only the transposition of scenes with Jane Austen's ironic speech, but a representation of irony in the production of the adaptation itself, despite the huge difference in historical and social context between the two works.