Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Movie Trailer:

The focus of my English literature major’s seminar at UBC (way back in the day – 2008) was literature and film adaptation. For my major’s thesis, I chose to look at the text Memoirs of a Geisha and its film adaptation. I was so excited to take a closer look at the two mediums of art, as it had been then one of my favourite novels and adaptations. However, after days of research and hours of writing a critical analysis on the text and the adaptation, I became increasingly disenchanted with both the text and film. Perhaps therein lies the flip side of critical theory. When you look at some things too closely, you see many things you otherwise would not have seen. Sometimes ignorance can be bliss. This week’s topic takes me back to my major’s seminar where I explored representations of Chinese actresses as Japanese women in a movie filmed in English that attempts to depict an “authentic” story of the lives of geisha (lives of whom are an actually extremely silenced and hidden history) written by a westerner. Nevertheless, despite the question of the historical “authenticity” of the story itself and the perhaps reductive depictions of the Hollywood movie, both novel and film are still wonderfully entertaining for what they are (whatever they are). Take a look at the trailer and news article that I have attached for interest’s sake.

News Article:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=20051211&id=dvxTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sTkNAAAAIBAJ&pg=4377,237507