Reading Screens
From text to film, TV and new media
Corpus Christi College Oxford
6 – 12 April 2003

• What is lost and what is gained in the passage from page to screen?
• How can literary theory and film theory enable us to ‘read’ screen adaptations?
• How are screen adaptations affected by modes of production and reception?
• What effect will new technologies have on writing and reading literature?

This conference aimed to provide an opportunity to redress the balance in status between the ‘film of the book’ and the ‘classic serial’ and their literary source materials. It also examined some of the ways in which new technologies are creating exciting new literary forms. The conference moved beyond the library to explore the contested relationships between the printed page and film, TV and PC screens. Major issues addressed were the aesthetics of adaptation and the potential of hypertext as a literary medium.

Editors’ Introduction

Educators commonly lament the fact that the quick fix of movies, TV, computer screens and video games is producing a whole generation for whom the printed word is no longer dominant – or, in the most extreme version of this complaint, no longer relevant. This is perhaps less disturbing if we consider the extent to which their level of exposure to visual images enables young people to ‘read’ screens with a facility (and very often with a degree of sophistication) that constitutes the basis for a new kind of – visual – literacy.

This was only one of the factors that determined the title and the themes of this year’s Oxford conference. We were also conscious of the increasing tendency among teachers of literature to take advantage of the widespread availability of filmed versions of literary texts on video and DVD; we considered the growing interest in many departments of literature and cultural studies in popular culture, particularly the near-global impact of television genres, such as soap opera, reality TV and game shows; and we were also interested in the largely untapped potential of the latest screens – PCs, laptops, hand-held e-book viewers – and the ways in which they might offer not only a new medium for viewing text, but actually suggest new modes of reading. It is perhaps significant that this year has also seen the merger of the British Council’s Film and Literature departments, acknowledging the close pedagogic connections between page and screen.

Plenary papers

In the opening paper, 'A raid on the articulate? Using film to illuminate literature', Alan Pulverness (Norwich Institute for Language Education) surveys modes of literary adaptation for the cinema, and examines some of the qualities shared by film and prose fiction, as well as the distinctive characteristics of each medium. Drawing on the screen adaptations of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, James Joyce’s The Dead, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Alex Garland’s The Beach, Alan focuses on iconic and indexical representation, on narrative viewpoint, and on the treatment of time and temporality.

Claudia Ferradas Moi (University of Quilmes/I.E.S. en Lenguas Vivas, Buenos Aires) extends her 2002 paper on 'Reading Screens' (which gave this year’s conference its title), presenting her 'Weaving a virtual web: the challenges of electronic literature'. Claudia takes the conference 'down the paths of electronic literature'. Taking the weaving of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as her point of departure, Claudia explores the brief history of hyperfiction, before outlining the pedagogic potential of this new literary form, as well as addressing some of its possible drawbacks.

Writing from the perspective of a language teacher working in a Cultural Studies context, Monika Seidl (University of Vienna) focuses on screen versions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to provide a case study in the construction and consumption of ‘heritage’ on TV and in the cinema. In her paper 'Adaptation: Narrative space into heritage space', Monika suggests that adaptation may be seen 'as an act of possession, as an appropriation' and that other, more familiar, forms of heritage culture can be enlisted to engage students in creative acts of retroactive reading.

'Methodological adaptations: Imagining an English Studies A-level' emerged to meet a need which arose during the conference, Katy Limmer compares the methodologies of Literary Studies and Film Studies and imagines ways in which the teaching of literature at A-level might be enhanced if it were to adopt some of the approaches established in Film Studies.

Other plenary presentations (not included here) were given by John Caughie (University of Glasgow) on how to read a film; Patrick Phillips (Middlesex University) on issues in constructing an academic film studies syllabus; Bernice Rubens (novelist) and Frank Cottrell Boyce (screenwriter) on the practice of adaptation. There were also readings (by Bernice Rubens, novelist Kate Pullinger and poet Tony Harrison), and screenings of A Revenger’s Tragedy introduced by the director Alex Cox and The Shadow of Hiroshima introduced by Tony Harrison.

Participants’ papers

Participants’ papers were loosely arranged in five strands: Screens in the Classroom, New Media, Adaptation: Drama into Film, Adaptation: Drama and Narrative into Opera and Film, and Adaptation: Narrative into Film.

Participants’ papers 1 – Screens in the Classroom

'Literature and Film: Reaching Out for a Smaller ‘l’: adaptation in the EFL classroom' by Carlos Reynoso (Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas 'Juan Ramón Fernández', Argentina) adopts a thematic approach to two treatments of Great Expectations: Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘unfaithful’ updated version and a version of Dickens’s text simplified for EFL learners. Proceeding from Jennings’s (1996) proposal for 'the analysis of theme in literature and film, which does not rely on the technical distinctions between the two media', he puts forward a strong argument for the graded reader as a form of literary adaptation, and provides a close reading for the classroom of several key scenes. Also concerned with thematic links, 'Moon Palace: films in the classroom' by Harald Weisshaar (University of Tübingen, Germany) proposes a methodology for using film to enrich students’ reading of a novel that has not (yet) been filmed. The approach suggests a whole range of intertextual ‘dialogues’ between literature and film that transcend the limits of straightforward adaptation.

Participants’ papers 2 – New Media

'Teaching literature and multimedia' by Milena Blazic(Assistant Professor for Literary Didactics and Creative Writing at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) outlines a response-based methodology for teaching literature with multimedia at primary school. Her approach is informed by reader response theory, as well as by insights from cognitive psychology, and has formed the basis for a recently published Slovenian textbook. 'The Hours: A community of one’s own. How traditional media welcome new media' by Patricia Huion (University of Louvain, Belgium) analyses the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours in terms of its hypertextual relationship to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, as well as its own source text. Stephen Daldry and David Hare’s film is presented as an example of cinema reinventing and refreshing itself 'by appropriating the characteristics of the new media'.

Participants’ papers 3 – Adaptation: Drama into Film

‘New World Order’ and Death and the Maiden: A semiotic reading of stage play and film adaptation' by Seong Je Kim (Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea) examines Roman Polanski and Rafael Yglesias’ adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s play 'Death and the Maiden'. In the context of Dorfman’s desire 'for stories of peace', he offers a semiotic analysis of a some key motifs in the text, as well as a detailed comparison of the transformations it undergoes in the passage from stage to screen. In her paper on Alan Clarke’s film of Andrea Dunbar’s play, 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too: Investigating the authority of the literary text in critical debate', Katy Limmer (Yeovil College, UK) is particularly concerned with issues of textual authority and the shifts in perspective that may occur when the work of a female author passes into the hands of a male auteur. However, she questions the notion of the auteur as sole creator, suggesting a more complex reading that takes into account the institutional nature of film making. In  'The Blockbuster Bard: Syncretic Shakespeare crosses over in the 1990s', Eckart Voigts-Virchow (University of Giessen, Germany) considers adaptations of Shakespeare, from the reverential conservative approach to the incongruous modernization of the updated version and the ‘transgressive’ variations of postmodernist, syncretic adaptations. Eckart focuses particularly on Julie Taymor’s Titus, Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, suggesting that the lack of a standard set of discursive codes for a Shakespeare film permits the creative freedom to produce hybrid adaptations that are multi-discursive and multi-generic.

Participants’ papers 4 – Adaptation: Drama and Narrative into Opera and Film

'Derek Jarman and the politics of the Renaissance' by László Sári (University of Pecs, Hungary) concentrates on the political content of Derek Jarman’s cinema, with particular reference to his ‘Renaissance’ films, Jubilee, Edward II and Caravaggio. Drawing extensively on Jarman’s own writing, László provides a critical analysis of the cultural and sexual politics informing director’s work, concluding that it demands an equivalent political engagement from the audience. Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta) traces the series of transformations undergone by Giovanni Verga’s short story Cavalleria Rusticana in its adaptations as play and opera, and in its appropriation as a central element in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather III. In her detailed reading of the climactic sequences of the film, Gloria discovers a complex layering of metatextual reference that adds depth and resonance to the end of the gangster saga.

Participants’ papers 5 – Adaptation: Narrative into Film

'Cavalleria Rusticana and metatextuality in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III' by Moinak Biswas (Jadavpur University, India) explores Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of a short-story by Rabindranath Tagore, which attracted so much hostile criticism that the director was prompted to write a detailed defence of his ‘departure’ from the source text. This critical debate provides the basis for Moinak’s case study in the ethics of adaptation. 'Reflections and self-reflexivity in Atom Egoyan’s film Felicia’s Journey' by Viktors Freibergs (University of Latvia) analyses several visual and aural effects employed by Atom Egoyan in his adaptation of William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey. Aspects of Egoyan’s highly distinctive style illustrate some of the characteristic features of the language of cinema. Three further papers focus on specific aspects of individual screen adaptations: '‘The Dead’ brought to life' by Donal Martin (British Council, Barcelona, Spain) examines the ways in which the motif of snow in James Joyce’s The Dead is rendered visually in John Huston’s film adaptation. In 'Dangerous liaisons of film and literature: Two film versions of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel', Patricia Rackova (University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic) compares two contrasting screen interpretations, by Milos Forman and Stephen Frears, of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereueses. In 'The Shadows of the Gods: Vergílio Ferreira – from literature to film' by Luís Miguel Oliveira de Barros Cardoso (Instituto Superior Politecnico de Viseu, Portugal) he discusses Manuel Guimarães’ ‘spiritually faithful’ adaptation of Vergílio Ferreira’s novel Cântico Final (Final Hymn). Finally, 'The cult TV show as postmodern primer' by Philip Sutton (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) provides a brief introduction to TV Studies, before suggesting some ways of reading cult TV shows such as The Avengers and The Prisoner.

The range and variety of screen texts (with and without literary connections) represented at the conference, as well as the depth of film literacy evidenced in these papers, confirmed our belief in the contribution that film studies has to make to the teaching of literature, but also demonstrated the coherence and rigour of film studies as a discipline in its own right. We hope that this collection of papers will encourage teachers of film and literature, both at secondary and tertiary levels, to develop their practice in reading screens.

Alan Pulverness
Claudia Ferradas Moi

Event Directors

Alan Pulverness is the author of All in a Word: literature in language teaching (Bell Educational Trust 1989) and co-author of a number of ELT textbooks, including the ESU/Duke of Edinburgh award-winning Macmillan Short Course Programme (1993; 1995). He has edited a schools’ edition of Macbeth (Societ´ Editrice Internazionale 2000) and was editorial adviser for The Literary Labyrinth (Societ´ Editrice Internazionale 1993) and The World Wide Reader (Oxford University Press & La Nuova Italia 2001). His most recent publication is Changing Skies: The European coursebook for advanced learners (Swan 2001). An Associate Trainer with the Norwich Institute for Language Education, he is Editor of Folio (the journal of the Materials Development Association) and of IATEFL Conference Selections.

Claudia Ferradas Moi is founder and co-director of the T. S. Eliot Bilingual Studies Centre, Banfield, Buenos Aires. She is also tenured lecturer in English Literature at the Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas "Juan Ramón Fernández", Buenos Aires, and is lecturer in charge of the virtual classroom on "Strategies for the Teaching of a Foreign Language" at the Virtual University of Quilmes, Argentina. She has published a number of articles on literature, rock poetry and hypertext fiction, and is the author of Rock Poetry in the Creative Language Classroom (DL Books, Buenos Aires, 1994), Words on Words - Teaching Contemporary UK Literature. A selection of works by Benjamin Zephaniah and John Burnside, with suggested activities for teachers (with Beatriz Pena Lima, Buenos Aires, British Council, 2002) and one of the contributors to Developing Materials for Language Teaching (ed. Tomlinson B., forthcoming).