I have to say that I really enjoyed the article this week. I am not really into biology…. I have a lot of friends in the sciences and I just don’t get it. However, relating biology to books and movies, that gets my attention. My mind was turning as I read the article and thought at the same time about the activity for class this week. What would I bring? What would I choose? Especially since the article got me thinking about some adaptations in a way I had never thought about them before. Relating the adaptation of text to biology made it suddenly seem so clear that adaptations of literature should be more about how the adaptation stands on its own and less about how it compares to its “roots”.
I am a bit of a movie buff so I went to my shelves to see just how many of my collection started out as books, or tv shows, or are even an adaptation of another movie. It was shocking to realize just how many of them were adpatations… and that is only the obvious ones! I didn’t look them all up. I am sure there are more!
I got thinking about my all time favourite book, Little Women by Louise May Alcott. I will talk more about this in class this week but for now, I had an idea. I wanted to compare a scene from the book to a scene from the original 1939 screen adaptation. I choose the party scene towards the beginning of the novel and read them both. They are so drastically different! I decided to put the texts into wordle to see how they would display. It was tricky because with the screenplay I had to choose to include the names of the characters that label their lines, or not. I choose to remove them and just stick to the dialogue.
This is the novel:
And this is the screenplay adaptation:
I’ll leave it at that for now. Excited to discuss this topic in class.
-Melissa 🙂
(Sorry, I am tech challenged and couldn’t get the wordles to be any bigger! I tried!!)
2 responses so far ↓
bsangster // Oct 9th 2012 at 6:47 pm
This is a really cool idea. I wish I wasn’t in such a homesick mock-turkey coma this weekend and remembered that Monday was… well, Monday.
I love the idea of comparing a scene from a screenplay to a scene in a movie. Obviously there are many ways that these adaptation can happen. Theatre script to film, literature to film, short story to feature length… etc. I think it’s especially important to consider this when thinking about how broad the possibilities for what adaptation can be.
The first thing that jumps out to me in your two wordles is the word “Oh”. In the book version it appears very small, probably unnoticeable, and in the film worlde it is probably the biggest word. The first question that this brings to mind is whether the script you accessed intentionally used the word “oh” in it’s dialogue, or if the script had been created after the film was completed. Either way, “oh” represents many things when we speak: shock, complacency, anger, etc. It comes as no surprise that these words are the focus of the film version wordle. Looking at the novel version the difference reminds us of the romanic voice that an author has when they are forced to create every detail of a scene for the reader.
I suppose the limitation of the wordle is that it lacks the critical eye to be able to adapt, interpret, and understand a director and film crews intentions from merely a script. If only in this circumstance the wordle could imagine the visuals of both the story and the film.
TMD // Oct 10th 2012 at 8:09 am
I agree with Brendan: what an interesting exercise. “Oh” does of course stick out as the word to examine. It is an interjection and a marker of oral discourse. We see it (and it’s historical antecedent, “O”) in poetry, with declining usage in writing if the Ngram Viewer is any indication (see my analysis here): https://blogs.ubc.ca/lled368/files/2012/10/oh1.png .
An exercise for students, thinking about teaching oral language, would be to offer the two Wordles and ask them which they think they think would be the novel versus the script — and why.
And let’s not forget that both Wordles may be thought of as adaptations . . .
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