Teaching Adaptations

D. Cartmell, I. Whelehan, D. Cartmell, I. Whelehan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137311122
• eBook ISBN: 9781137311139
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Teaching Adaptations addresses the challenges and appeal of teaching popular fiction and culture, video games and new media content, which serve to enrich the curriculum, as well as exploit the changing methods by which English students read and consume literary and screen texts.

1

A Short History of Adaptation Studies in the Classroom

Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan

Adaptation studies is a growth area in the Arts and Humanities and has brought numerous multidisciplinary perspectives to what used to be more commonly known as ‘novel to film’ or ‘literature and film’ studies. The impact of adaptation studies on English has been indisputably significant, and it could be argued that the study of adaptations has changed the way we teach the subject for good; at the very least it is now common to see English modules delivered with varying degrees of adaptation content across the globe, even if, as Thomas Leitch asserts, ‘English studies has continued to treat film adaptation not so much with hostility as with benign neglect’.¹ While fictional texts and their feature film adaptations remain at the subject’s core,² the study of adaptations has broadened to embrace ‘literature’ and the ‘screen’ in the broadest senses of each word. With a new theoretical richness and interdisciplinary confidence, adaptation studies has facilitated fresh approaches to issues of interpretation, rewriting, and refunctioning, enabling purposeful reflection on our contemporary obsession with reworking culture to suit our own needs.

In order to demonstrate how adaptation studies has changed, we take the case of the use of films based on Austen’s fictions within literary studies. Like Shakespeare, Jane Austen is firmly embedded in the field of adaptation studies as an author who has repeatedly had the ‘adaptation treatment’, beginning with a chapter on Robert Z. Leonard’s 1940 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier) in the first full-length study of literature and film, George Bluestone’s Novel into Film (1957). By 2009, Austen and film had become a major critical preoccupation, as Pamela Church Gibson’s summary of work on Austen and film demonstrates,³ with a list that includes Sue Parrill’s Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptation (2002), Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen in Hollywood (1998; 2nd edn 2001), Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson’s Jane Austen and Co. (2003), Gina MacDonald and Andrew F. MacDonald’s Jane Austen on Screen (2003), and David Monaghan, Ariane Hudelet and John Wiltshire’s The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the Novels (2009). Claire Harmon’s Jane’s Fame (2009) and the online journal Persuasions, which frequently delivers articles on Austen films, demonstrate a modern tendency to move away from an absorption in the novels themselves to the fictions’ afterlives. It now seems obligatory to include at least one chapter on ‘Austen films’ or ‘Austen offshoots’ in collected essays on her work, because studies of Austen are no longer complete until they show consideration of how her work provides inspiration for other trends in contemporary culture, from chick lit to dating manuals, to testing the ability of contemporary bestselling writers like Joanna Trollope and Val McDermid to ‘reimagine Austen’ all over again.⁴

Given the number of films of Austen’s novels, it has been hard to ignore them in the classroom, and for many years much teaching has relied on them to explicate the text for a new cohort of students. Since the availability of videos in the 1970s, teaching often involved showing a short clip ‘illustrating’ a part of a novel or play as a means to open up discussion, but always as a path back to consideration of the book. While it is easy to appreciate the relevance of film clips within Shakespeare classes (given that the plays are performance pieces), showing novel adaptations was a practice harder to justify in the early days of video. Such a practice was, more often than not, scorned rather than applauded, a legacy of the chequered history of literature and film, when critics, in the first half of the twentieth century, blushed when suggesting that an author’s work might be influenced by cinema.⁵ Showing film clips, however, could be defended as a means of inspiring discussion that would often take the form of reflecting on what was wrong with the film adaptation, how it misunderstood the literary text, thereby empowering the students (as ‘ENGLISH students’) to feel a sense of superiority over those involved in the making of such films. In the not-so-distant past (certainly in our memories), the showing of films in literature classes was often stigmatized by academics and teachers, who believed such practice as lazy and, even more unforgivably, a devaluing of literature that unwittingly encouraged pupils to watch movies rather than read books. As Timothy Corrigan has noted, for most of the twentieth century, adaptation studies failed to capture the interest of film scholars (as the approach taken by their literary colleagues so frequently devalued the film text) and English academics (who regarded the use of film as either offering a cheap substitute for literature or as an excuse to bask in the superiority of literature over cinema).⁶ Still within the field of Austen studies today, it is remarkable how little reflection there is on the implications of showing a clip from a film to ‘illustrate’ a novel, how little the film itself is valued as a product of many, rather than belonging to an individual, and how the concepts of popularization and commercial value are dismissed as either irrelevant or demeaning. Adaptation teachers have a steep hill to climb.

There is no doubt, however, that the field developed in English Studies through the inclusion of screen adaptations of canonical authors in the everyday practice of teaching and that authors and authorship still shape what is taught today. Following Shakespeare, Austen made a breakthrough, thanks partially to the numerous film adaptations since 1940 and thanks, too, to the fact that she is a major player in the English literature syllabus. Indeed these two facts are interrelated; today canonical status is not only assigned to a work by a single literary critical guru, such as F.R. Leavis, or by the number of citations it receives long after the death of the author, but is often bestowed in recognition of the number of films it has generated. We still have some way to go in breaking Austen adaptations away from exclusively author-centred approaches, as is the case with other canonical writers whose screen treatment is growing to industrial proportions. As several of the contributors to this volume suggest, following on from Robert Stam’s introduction to Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (2003),⁷ one way of approaching the afterlife of, say, Austen’s fiction is to adapt Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality to Austen adaptations, to think of her novels, not as sources but as ‘hypotexts’ and consider adaptations as texts in their own right, through an analysis of intertextuality (quotations or allusions to other texts), paratextuality (the materials surrounding the text, such as posters, reviews, trailers), metatextuality (the commentary on the text within the text), and architextuality (the title chosen, the structure adopted).

Scholarship on Austen and film is not the only critical turning point in adaptation studies. Since the mid-1990s adaptations themselves have had a significant part to play in popularizing an interest in the process itself, and in the people who contribute to it. Andrew Davies’ role in scripting the 1995 BBC TV version of Pride and Prejudice was foregrounded in critical appraisals of the work, particularly in his ‘unfaithful’ development of a profound sexual tension between the two chief protagonists which lasted for most of the miniseries’ five and half hours duration, and which is best remembered for a drenched and dishevelled Darcy encountering Elizabeth Bennet in the grounds of Pemberley. Colin Firth’s performance as Darcy was also credited with focusing the attention of a new generation of female viewers, and the components of such a winning formula were discussed and dissected by the broadsheets and a ‘making of’ documentary and book. Davies by his own admission, ‘sexed up’ Austen and more or less got away with it; Patricia Rozema’s feature film adaptation of Mansfield Park (1999) used sex and postcolonial critique to encourage a newly interactive Austen audience to read her against the grain. The initial furore around such versions was essential raw material in the seminar room, and while we look back at the 1990s as a time when we were stuck in the canon, these adaptation case studies redirected students’ attention to how the canon was constantly reforming itself and could work in reverse thrust too, as is the case when costumes from Austen adaptations end up doing the rounds of stately homes as ersatz heritage artefacts.

Adaptation studies can open our minds to considerations often swept beneath the carpet in literary studies, regarding the popularization of a text through marketing, standardization (or genre), intertextuality, or plagiarism, and the targeting of specific audiences. What this offers students is an opportunity to go in countless directions; rather than each writing the same essay on, say the representation of Pemberley in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice (with the inevitable conclusion, much to the chagrin of the adaptation teacher, that the book is better and more complexly articulated). Removed from the need to foreground the novel as ur-text, students explore aspects previously uncharted, such as soundtracks, costumes, mise en scène, trailers, posters, games, music, tie-ins, book covers using film illustrations, casting, genre, intertextual references to earlier films, and popular forms; the list seems endless. An example of this approach is a student essay that demonstrated how Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice adapts ‘Cinderella’ (as much as Austen’s novel) in the Pemberley sequence, with Elizabeth running away from her embarrassment at being found out, hotly pursued by Darcy (now Prince Charming). This analysis was a springboard for a consideration of the unacknowledged use of fairy tale narrative and iconography throughout the film, pushing aside the significance of Austen’s narrative. Adaptation studies today, as is evident in the variety of articles in our journal Adaptation (OUP, 2008–) and in numerous volumes commenting on the state of the discipline, is far from fixed on seeing adaptation as a one-way, essentially dead-end journey from literary text to film, and is by no means restricted to canonical literature.

We began, at De Montfort University in 1992, teaching a third year course in Shakespeare on film which developed into a course on adaptations (initially, largely adaptations of canonical texts to placate our literary colleagues), which gradually introduced popular adaptations of children’s fiction and graphic novels. The course expanded to three courses for years one, two, and three and then, as students progressed and demanded more, a taught Masters. We were able to show that, contrary to the fears expressed by some colleagues, learning adaptations made our students better ‘readers’ of both film and literary texts, and much more adept textual critics.

The MA was taught jointly with Film Studies colleagues, itself representing a sea change in the disciplinary organization of such courses, and included modules on Gothic, Popular Forms, Classic Adaptations, and Shakespeare. Work on genre and popular fiction, much as lecturers who have taught it know, stretches the students and encourages them to produce their most sophisticated work on the seemingly less sophisticated subjects, topics which challenged their literary and film studies training. We found adaptation an area also attractive to PhD students, possibly for the same reasons that it flourished at undergraduate level, in that it offered so much uncharted territory to explore and it so easily lent itself to fierce opinions and debate through shared experiences, but also because of its interdisciplinarity and the availability of original and challenging projects.

Teaching adaptations to all levels of students made us completely unembarrassed about the use of film clips. There is something to be said about the benefits of film clips offering a welcome break from the pressures of teaching, and postgraduates, like English teachers, find film a useful crutch in their first presentations of their research to their peers. The wheel, to an extent, has come full circle: showing films is sometimes still regarded as effortless and captivating, but it need not be a guilty pleasure, as it tended to be in English Studies in the last half of the twentieth century. As part of a doctoral training programme at De Montfort University’s Centre for Adaptations, research students each present a film clip to their peers to view and then discuss in relation to their research project. At first the presenting student remains quiet, absorbing the comments of their colleagues, but as the discussion develops, the student takes an increasingly leading role in the seminar as their superior knowledge becomes evident, both to themselves and to their colleagues. These sessions are entertaining and informative as well as confidence building, providing a gentle introduction to the art of seminar presentation and teaching, while at the same time stressing that there is nothing wrong with showing clips.

In many respects, adaptation studies should not be ashamed of its history, especially in its quest to both empower and entertain, which it was implicitly criticized for doing for most of the twentieth century. Empowering readers (and viewers) is an important feature of the teaching of adaptation, and in this respect it is not new, but has a history that pre-dates the Leavises – indeed cinema itself. Early modern manuscript culture can be seen as an early form of ‘adaptation studies’ in which readers, oblivious to the sanctity of an ‘original’, were encouraged to revise, strikeout, and offer alternatives or solutions to questions posed by a text in manuscript, which was seen as essentially and importantly incomplete in itself.⁸ What Chris Stamatakis describes as ‘the rhetoric of rewriting’, as it applies to Thomas Wyatt, is a model for adaptation studies as a whole that, in its numerous failed attempts to find ‘a theory of adaptation’ (significantly the title of Linda Hutcheon’s seminal work in the field)⁹ is, as this volume testifies, united in at least one thing: its view of both the adaptation and the adaptation critic as engaged in the process of ‘rewriting’. Adaptation is essentially about a response to change.

This collection offers some suggestions, through accounts of the authors’ teaching practices, of useful ways to respond to change at the heart of the teaching of English using adaptations. In ‘Canons, Critical Approaches, and Contexts’, Shelley Cobb identifies an emerging ‘canon’ of adaptation studies across the US, UK, and Australia, an ironic consequence of the institutional effects of curriculum development, even in area that attempts to destabilize literary and film studies canons. She notes that the term ‘adaptation’ is often suppressed in course outlines, once more drawing attention to the uneasy placing of adaptation studies in either the study of film or literature. She finds ‘Shakespeare on Screen’ the most common, followed by courses that include ‘classic’ novel adaptations, with Dickens, Austen, Dracula, Frankenstein, and A Room with a View the most frequently taught, although contemporary adaptations, including those of graphic narratives, recur on course outlines. Cobb argues that literary text-or genre-based approaches risk de-historicizing adaptations and she argues for an historical approach that reads adaptations made within the same period, so that questions relating to cultural, social, and industrial contexts are more rooted and therefore more graspable by students. Like the current state of English literary studies, adaptation teaching has taken a decidedly creative turn, both in the UK and abroad. Laurence Raw, writing about his experience of EFL teaching in Turkey, demonstrates how getting students to adapt texts and relate them to their own backgrounds enables them to deconstruct cultural values they previously took for granted. By getting them to assess their own adaptations, he encourages them to think about the commercial processes required to prepare an adaptation for audience consumption. This reflective and collaborative approach to learning produces students with increased language confidence and developed critical thinking skills.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter: 1 A Short History of Adaptation Studies in the Classroom
• Chapter: 2 Canons, Critical Approaches, and Contexts
• Chapter: 3 The Paragogy of Adaptation in an EFL Context
• Chapter: 4 Avoiding ‘Compare and Contrast’: Applied Theory as a Way to Circumvent the ‘Fidelity Issue’
• Chapter: 5 Learning to Share: Adaptation Studies and Open Education Resources
• Chapter: 6 Doing Adaptation: The Adaptation as Critic
• Chapter: 7 Teaching Adapting Screenwriters: Adaptation Theory through Creative Practice
• Chapter: 8 Out of the Literary Comfort Zone: Adaptation, Embodiment, and Assimilation
• Chapter: 9 ‘Adapting’ from School to University: Adaptations in the Transition
• Chapter: 10 Coming soon … Teaching the Contemporaneous Adaptation
• Chapter: 11 Teaching Adaptations through Marketing: Adaptations and the Language of Advertising in the 1930s
• Appendix A: Instructions for the Creative-Critical Project
• Appendix B: Marking Descriptors for the Creative-Critical Project
• Chronology of Key Publications and Events
• Select Bibliography
• Index