Late 19th- and early 20th-Century:
Critique of "Western" Civilization & Alienation

Unsettling global correspondences among world "myths" & rituals undermine white European claims to civilized superiority and divine right to rule the rest of the world -  e.g. James G. Frazer’s Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) & Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (Fisher king); Carl Jung (1875-1961): all humans share common spiritual/ psychic heritage: collective unconscious, racial memories, archetypes emerge in dreams, myth/religion, art & literature.  [Jung was a student of Sigmund Freud.] - see also Cora' presentation handout on "Myth Lit. Theory" [in Emergence of the Short Story (Presentation/Handout Outline - Week #4)
URL: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/storytelling.htm

Increased access to, interest in non-Western and "minority" viewpoints, cultures, creative arts.

Catastrophe of WWI, for many, dismantled their faith in Western civilization, its cultural-social values, its political-economic policies, and the violent, military consequences: i.e.  the excesses and devastation of "the great war"--ironically AKA: "the war to end all wars"--which nearly wiped out a generation of young European men and left an alienated group of survivors, which Gertrude Stein labeled the "lost generation."

A radical break from traditional structures of Western culture & art seemed the only possible response to many Modernist artists, who sought and created new literary/artistic forms to render their experiences and perceptions of contemporary disorder, chaos, injustice, hypocrisy, bankruptcy, alienation.

Intensified critique of capitalism and consumerism of the "new rich," built upon predatory exploitation of working class & of "third world" colonized peoples (rationalized as the "White Man's Burden" and "civilizing mission"). 
Alienation from urbanized bureaucratic society - depicted as a sterile, materialistic "waste land"
(>e.g. in T. S. Eliot's influential "high modernist" work The Waste Land, 1922; the same year that James Joyce published Ulysses, another monumental literary work of "high" modernist innovation).

• Genres and techniques develop in response to particular cultural, communication, & creative situations
• Literary genres evolve like social institutions: their conventions/codes emerge, develop, & change over time, reflecting the (changing) values, imagination, spirit of the age, culture, artist

Challenges for Readers

• Modernist author, via Narrator suggests/evokes, but does not explain;
• Uses personal (not public shared) symbol system that must be figured out from work itself;
• Treats new, previously forbidden subjects;
• Tries to unsettle readers’ expectations; shock out of complacency;
• Presents open-ended, ironic, multi-layered, ambiguous and "inconclusive" stories
• Without a conclusive "end" orientation, the process, journey, search for meaning becomes meaningful in itself (even if goal never reached);
• Reader must engage in this journey as active searcher, co-creator of meaning: "emplot" life

"All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story
And it is one of the greatest stories ever written."
Vladimir Nabokov (1981) on Chekhov’s "The Lady with the Pet Dog" (1899)

Film Adaptation

Kline, Karen E.  “The Accidental Tourist on Page and on Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories about Film Adaptation.”  Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996): 70 (14 pp).  Rpt. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, 2002.  Article No. 9605150332.

 * * Kline's Introduction, Cora's Summary of section 1: Four Critical Paradigms of Film Adaptation* *
[discussed in class on Wed., 6 Nov. 2002]; Excerpt from Kline's Conclusion, & partial Works Cited

[Kline's Introduction:]

The issue of adaptation has long been a salient one among film critics for quite practical reasons, as Dudley Andrew has observed:

The making of a film out of an earlier text is virtually as old as the machinery of cinema itself. Well over half of all commercial films have come from literary originals, though by no means all of these originals are revered or respected. (10)

While a diverse range of literary genres has spawned film adaptations, the novel has been by far the most popular written source throughout the history of the cinema. Morris Beja estimates that in the typical year, about 30 percent of American movies are based on novels. And among the films that have won either the Academy Award or the New York Film Critics Award for "Best Picture" since 1935, the largest proportion have been film adaptations of novels (Beja 78).

In light of the important role novels have played in service to filmmaking, then, it is not surprising that, when faced with the prospect of evaluating a film based on a novel, critics often ground their judgments in assessments of the effectiveness of the adaptation. Yet, it is not uncommon to find contradictory evaluations of the same film, with one critic judging the adaptation successful while another deems it a failure. Some might argue that such disagreement simply illustrates the utter subjectivity of criticism; however, I contend that these differences in judgment stem from the critics' adoption of differing paradigms for evaluating the film adaptation.

In this essay, I examine four prominent paradigms concerning film adaptation that are at work in contemporary academic criticism, and I explore the limits and possibilities of discourse that each paradigm permits, using the film adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel The Accidental Tourist to illustrate. It is not my purpose to conclude that one particular paradigm is necessarily best, for such a judgment would ignore a complexity of factors that mitigate in the individual case, including the linguistic qualities of the specific novel and the sociohistorical circumstances of the film's creation. Rather, this essay is an attempt to re-configure the critical discourse about film adaptation, by pointing to the assumptions behind the critic's adoption of a particular paradigm and the constraints upon critical commentary that result from that decision.

"Four Critical Paradigms of Film Adaptation"
Cora's Summary of & Quoted Excerpts from first section of Kline's Article:
1. Translation | 2. Pluralist | 3. Transformation | 4. Materialist

Paradigm 1:  "Translation"
[Kline:]  "A critic adopting this perspective judges the film's effectiveness primarily in terms of its 'fidelity' to the novel [i.e. the original literary work of narrative fiction], particularity with regard to narrative elements, such as character, setting, and theme.  Dudley Andrew refers to this as the film remaining faithful to the 'letter' of the text (12)."  Critics who accept the "translation" paradigm as valid for judging a film adaptation, also concede that a feature film adaptation (limited usually to two hours' run time) must select and condense the original novel, simplify or eliminate its minor characters and complex subplots.  Even so, critics like Michael Klein and Gillian Parker expect the film to remain faithful to "'the main thrust of the narrative, to the author's central concerns, to the natures of the major characters, to the ambiance of the novel, and . . . [its] genre . . .'" (qtd. in Kline).  "Translation" critics feel justified in condemning film adaptations that depart from these expectations. 
Kline points out that the principal assumption undergirding the "translation paradigm" is "that the novel is the privileged artistic work, while the film exists to 'serve' its literary precursor."  The "translation paradigm" also privileges "traditionally literary elements while minimizing specifically cinematic elements, and . . . value[s] similarities rather than differences between the written and cinematic texts." 

Paradigm 2:  "Pluralist"
[Kline:]  "Critics adopting this model value the film's ability to present a coherent fictive world within itself which bears significant traces of the novel operating at a somewhat abstract emotional/intellectual level.  Dudley Andrew has labels this the film's allegiance to the 'spirit' of the novel (12).  Of central concern from this critical perspective are the film's ability to exist in its own right but also to convey such qualities as the novel's mood, tone, and values."  Kline elaborates by quoting Morris Beja:  "'Of course what a film takes from a book matters; but so does what it brings to a book. . . . The resulting film is then not a betrayal and not a copy, not an illustration and not a departure.  It is a work of art that relates to the book from which it derives yet is also independent, an artistic achievement that is in some mysterious way the 'same' as the book but also something other: perhaps something less but perhaps something more as well' (88)."  Such a film adaptation "'remains true to the spirit'" [June Perry Levine qtd. in Kline] of a novel even as it may change the the original - e.g. by adding scenes to flesh out a major character, or by deleting some minor characters while elevating others.
Kline identifies key assumptions undergirding the "pluralist paradigm":  a successful film adaptation "presents 'analogies' between the novel and the film, thus implying that there are essential differences between the[se] two sign systems.  Nevertheless, the possibility of equivalence is also assumed by advocates of [the pluralist] paradigm . . . ."  Differences between film and literature are "acceptable," but  "similarities are expected as well"--thus, a "successful" film adaptation must "find a 'balance' between these two opposing tendencies."

Paradigm 3:  "Transformation"
[Kline:]  "Critics adopting this approach consider the novel raw material which the film alters significantly, so that the film becomes an artistic work in its own right."  "Transformation" critics occupy "a range of positions" depending upon the "extent to which [they believe that] the connection between novel and film should be retained in the adaptation."  Some critics welcome a successful film adaptation that "transforms" the original literary work "into something new and different," but still expect to find "traces" of the original literary work; others view the original literary work "merely as raw material, as simply the occasion" for producing an original work of  film art.  Critics like Keith Cohen go even farther: Cohen requires a successful film adaptation to free itself from the literary original--to "subvert its original" by criticizing the literary model or exposing its contradictions--otherwise the film adaptation offers "'nothing more than . . . seeing words changed into images'" (Cohen 255, qtd. in Kline).  More conservative than Cohen at this end of the range also reside "transformative" critics like John Orr [re: The Year of Living Dangerously] and Gabriel Miller [re: Hester Street], who applaud film adaptations that improve upon their literary originals. 
Kline identifies "two significant assumptions underlying critical work within the transformation paradigm.  First scholars adopting this approach consider the novel and the film to be separate, autonomous arts, constituted by different sign systems.  Finding equivalencies between the two systems is not a priority, and, indeed, may not be possible according to this paradigm."  "Second, critics adopting this paradigm often end up privileging the cinematic text over its literary source in their commentary."

Paradigm 4:  "Materialist"
[Kline:]  "Critics adopting this approach examine the film as the product of cultural-historical processes.  While the film's literary source is not overlooked, the influence of that source" is less important than understanding "'the world from which [the film adaptation] comes and the one toward which it points'" (Dudley Andrew 16-17, qtd. in Kline).  "Materialist" critics may consider "the institutional factors affecting cultural productions" and give much less weight to whether or not the film adaptation is comparable to the original literary work.

[From Kline's Conclusion:]

"A film adaptation cannot be all things to all people, especially when the people in question are film critics who bring differing critical paradigms to bear in their evaluations of the film's effectiveness as an adaptation.  In this essay, I have explored four paradigms that are prevalent in normative critical discourse about film adaptations, identifying the assumptions underlying each paradigm and illustrating how each paradigm makes certain critical commentary possible while simultaneously constraining other observations the critic might make.  In the end, the critical paradigm might best be understood as a filter or lens which shapes the critic's perspective, facilitating his or her inevitable selectivity in isolating specific qualities in the novel and the film that the critic decides is most crucial to his or her judgments. . . ."

Works Cited [in Cora's Summary & Excerpts from Kline]

Andrew, Dudley.  "The Well Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film History and Theory."  Narrative Strategies: Original Essay sin Film and Prose Fiction.  Ed. Syndy M. Conger and Janice R. Welsch.  IL: Western Illinois Univ., 1980.  9-17.

Beja, Morris.  Film and Literature: An Introduction.  New York: Longman, 1979.

Cohen, Keith.  "Eisenstein's Subversive Adaptation."  The Classic American Novel and the Movies.  Ed. Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin.  New York:  Frederick Ungar, 1977.  239-256.

Klein, Michael, and Gillian Parker.  "Introduction: Film and Literature.  The English Novel and the Movies.  Ed. Michael Klein and Gillian Parker.  New York: Frederck Ungar, 1981.

Levine, June Perry.  "Two Rooms with a View: An Inquiry into Film Adaptation."  Mosaic 22.3 (Summer 1989): 67-84.

McDougal, Stuart Y.  Made into Movies:  From Literature to Film.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.

Miller, Gabriel.  Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film.  New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

Orr, John.  "Peter Weir's Version: The Year of Living Dangerously."  Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950-1990.  Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1992.  54-65.

---

Source:

Kline, Karen E.  “The Accidental Tourist on Page and on Screen: Interrogating Normative Theories about Film Adaptation.”  Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996): 70 (14 pp).  Rpt. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, 2002.  Article No. 9605150332.