Abstract
A range of pedagogic, disciplinary, and institutional factors can inform the construction of a curriculum for a course on film and television adaptations; among these factors, the availability of published scholarship on the set texts (whether literary, film, or television) may be a key concern for tutors, students, and validating committees alike. These pressures might mean that in some circumstances those adaptations that have attracted significant academic interest are more likely to be adopted than those that have been overlooked, and in this way emerging canons can become self-perpetuating (see Cobb, this volume). Of course, the very notion of the canon has been critically contested and its potential complicity in hierarchies of cultural power and value interrogated, especially in relation to gender, class, and race. However, questions of canon persist, and perhaps especially so when a field of study is relatively new and where the existence of a demonstrable canon might be seen as a necessary condition for disciplinary credibility. In this context it may seem perverse to focus on adaptations which, by definition, offer no supporting critical apparatus. This chapter seeks to explore the value and benefits of teaching contemporaneous adaptations, by which I mean film or television adaptations whose release or broadcast is concurrent with the delivery of the teaching programme; it will do so through a focus on a specific case study in pedagogic practice — an active learning strategy presented under the title of ‘Adaptation Watch’.1
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Notes
Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry 32(4), Summer 2006, 703.
Philip Kemp, ‘Interview with Julian Jarrold’, Sight & Sound 18(10), October 2008, 37.
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In an interview with Philip Kemp, Jarrold explained: ‘We went almost everywhere first but there was nowhere else that felt like a Catholic family had lived there’, Sight & Sound 18(10), October 2008, 38.
John J. Su, ‘Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate Novel’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 48(3), Fall 2002, 554.
Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 106.
Catherine Grant, ‘Recognising Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Autuerist ‘Free’ Adaptation’, Screen 43(1), 2002, 59.
Amy Raphael, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, Sight & Sound 21(12), December 2011, 34.
Kate Stables, ‘Wuthering Heights’ [Review], Sight & Sound 21(12), December 2011, 82.
Stephen Bourne, ‘Secrets and Lies: Black British Histories and British Historical Films’, British Historical Cinema: The Fistory, Feritage and Costume Film, ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sergeant (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 48.
Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television (London: Sage, 2002), p. 142.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 35.
Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 97.
Elsie Michie, ‘From Siminized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 25(2), Winter 1992, 129.
Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 97.
James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 26.
Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p. 109.
Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 145.
Graham Huggan, ‘Prizing Otherness: A Short History of the Booker’, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 118.
Graham Huggan, ‘Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postsecular’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’?’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 56(4), 2010, 764–765.
Priya Jaikumar, ‘Sabu’s Skins: The Transnational Stardom of an Elephant Boy’, Wasafiri 27(2), 2012, 63.
See also Ian Iqbal Rashid, ‘Song of Sabu: Hollywood Cinema and the Displacement of Desire’, Wasafiri 23, 1996, 33–39.
Sarah Street, ‘“Color consciousness”: Natalie Kalmus and Technicolour in Britain’, Screen 50(2), Summer 2009, 208.
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© 2014 Rachel Carroll
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Carroll, R. (2014). Coming Soon … Teaching the Contemporaneous Adaptation. In: Cartmell, D., Whelehan, I. (eds) Teaching Adaptations. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311139_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311139_10
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