Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Here is the app “Vyclone” I was talking about in class. It’s a film sharing app for you and your friends!

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/vyclone/id521680614?mt=8

A lot of class members are revisiting a previous course topic and posting Wordles. Some are interested in modifying shape. I mentioned in response to Kiran A’s post that there is an application that allows one to play with shape: Tagxedo, http://www.tagxedo.com .

Here’s an example I created this morning (the text is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

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!!)

Disclosure: I am a RENT-head. And I love to cry.

On a bright and very early morning in the spring of 1997, I stood with a friend, in a long and winding line, outside the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway and 41^st. We were waiting to get student rush tickets to the preview production of RENT. We felt as if we were taking part in something larger than ourselves; we were a part of a community, a culture. We got front row seats. And my life was subsequently transformed.

This rock musical had a profound effect on me. I felt as if it related to me. I was a student, I was a bohemian, I was urban, I was young, I was drawn to “counter-culture” and social justice, I knew people who were living with and dying of AIDS, and I was a romantic who yearned to be in love.

It didn’t matter (did it?) that I was unaware that this musical was an adaptation of Puccini’s opera La Boheme?

A few years later, I saw the opera La Boheme. The themes and characters of course were familiar: bohemian life, poverty, romantic interest, disease, death (near-death in RENT). The romanticization and the marginalization of bohemian life, the love triangles: these proverbial themes, bolstered by the connections I was able to make between the two musical forms, were a source of engagement. Even the similarities between the names (Roger-Roggiero, Mimi etc) were a source of interest and delight for me.

Seeing La Boheme, in the context of RENT, made me appreciate it and enjoy it on a deeper level.

The question then arises: How is viewing the “original” or predecessor affected/framed by the adaptation? Does it matter which is seen first and which second?

It seems to me, it doesn’t much matter what the “source” is, what is seen first or second. Each has life of its own that both reflects particular socio-cultural circumstances, and resonates with universal themes. This is the crux I think – the cultural relevance and milieu: the “narrative phenotype” in the words of Bortolotti and Hutcheon. In other words: the combination of the narrative story (thematic elements) plus the cultural relevance/milieu –“allowing the story to fit a particular culture or environment.”

The interesting thing here is how narratives change over time, and why and how certain ideas can be adapted to new audiences: why we choose to retell certain themes that can be traced back (“lineage of descent”) and how these choices function within culture. This to me rings of the enduring particular-universal paradox: the magic of locating universal threads within particular settings.

To me, success is premised on whether the story, in whichever form, made me cry! As long as the conditions for the cathartic “moments” are there, it has served its purpose.

High, low, original, and derivative are moot terms. An adaptation stands on its-own; it breathes its own life. Fidelity to the original is irrelevant to an evaluation of success. An adaptation is successful in “propagating the narrative for which it is a vehicle” (Bortolotti and Hutcheon). It is successful in that it makes us re-engage with this narrative, in novel ways.

Having said all this, I remember being very anxious and ambivalent about seeing the movie RENT when it came out. I didn’t want it to interfere with my “sacred” experience of RENT Live. The temporal and spatial and conceptual distance from Puccini to Jonathan Larson was a space I was comfortable with. But from RENT the Broadway musical to RENT the movie?  Here were expectations of fidelity. Why? Does temporal and spatial proximity have to do with such expectations?

Perhaps it’s a generational thing: “These kids don’t even know the original!” But now I ask myself: Does it matter? Why? The important thing is that people find it meaningful in some way. And hopefully, it will prompt them to explore other forms, variations, and adaptations, and to proliferate this very conversation.

Post script: Following a reading of Messaris’s article on visual imagery, I am adapting the term paraproxemics in relation to the original RENT poster, arguing for the function of the closeness of the camera-subject relationship (the close-up faces) as affecting viewers’ emotions and attitudes as it reflects interpersonal distance as a regulator of intimacy. There is something about the “in-your-face-ness” of it that is bold, striking, youthful, and arguably, a little oppositionary, all of which go along with the energy and underlying message of the bohemian cast of characters.

Works cited:

Bortolotti, G. and Hutcheon, L. (2007). On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” — Biologically. New Literary History, 38(3), pp. 443-458.

Messaris, P. (1998). Visual Aspects of Media Literacy. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 70-80.

A poetic tribute to one of my favorite poets, Holderlin. I taught myself how to use Prezi while doing this and realized it would be fun/instructional to do it in class. Many of the techniques remind me of the basic visual rhetoric of film. Please forgive the rough transitions as I am still obviously far from mastering the medium.

In the summer of 2009, I did a volunteer internship with Amnesty International. Part of my job was to design educational kits for the classroom which would teach youth about human rights.  Although some may argue that an introduction to the concept of humanitarianism belongs in a social studies curriculum, I think that any field of study can incorporate philanthropy into its discourse.

I must admit that since being introduced to Wordle in this class, I’ve become slightly addicted.  I can see how it would be a great tool, especially for determining students’ prior knowledge on a subject, and also as a hook to a possible lesson.   I re-examined the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and thought it’d be neat to take the preamble of the document, and see what I could create in Wordle.  I thought it’d be neat to take what as text appears somewhat dry, and re-animate it using this tool.  I also tried to shape the actual image so it was balanced both horizontally and vertically in an attempt to create a globe-like structure.  This is what I came up with.  Although it’s not exactly what I had in mind, I still think it’s a beautiful representation of the very first global expression of human rights.

– Kiran Aujlay

In “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” Biologically”, the authors discuss how an adapted narrative should determine its success not on how well it follows or replicates the original source of inspiration but how it has evolved to form itself into an independent entity.  I thought a useful exercise to demonstrate various parts of the article would be to examine an example of an adaptation.  “I Met The Walrus” is an animated short film, adapted from an original interview with John Lennon, conducted by a 14 year old Jerry Levitan.  The original interview was 30 minutes long but for the film, it was edited down to five minutes.  The short film was hugely successful and won numerous awards including an Emmy and it also secured an Oscar nod.  It is now also a best selling book with the same title, written by Levitan.

I believe this is an example of a successful adaptation because it speaks to the notion of diversity, as mentioned in the article.  In this case, it is the different forms of media: an interview, which only existed in audio format was then translated into a visual form which now has been translated into text.  I’d also argue that the success behind the short film is also the fact that the medium or vehicle through which the core narrative was delivered was so different from the original source, that it wasn’t difficult for the adaptation to exist as an independent entity.  Critics watch this film and see it as its own work of art, as opposed to something that wishes to imitate or recreate the success of an existing piece.

As a general comment in regards to the article, I found it to be a very engaging piece.  As an future English teacher, I’m constantly finding ways to bridge the gap between science and the arts, and the fact that the authors managed to use evolutionary theory as an analogy in the context of literary adaptation successfully, made for an interesting read.

For a better version of this video, click here: I Met The Walrus

Sources: “I Met The Walrus” Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Met_the_Walrus

-Kiran Aujlay

Although I’m home sick, I still wanted to share what I had prepared for class today.  One of my favourite local magazines is Adbusters.  The magazine takes a radical and critical approach to consumerism and often comes up with spoof ads as a social commentary about the impact advertising can have on society.  One such spoof ad I came across on the weekend was in response to those famous Joe Camel ads from the 70s-80s.

Here’s the original ad:

And here’s the spoof ad:

This spoof ad is particularly powerful because it mocks the original Joe Camel ads which depicted a cool character sporting a cigarette, insinuating that by smoking, he upped his cool factor.  Instead, the spoof ad paints the same character in a pathetic light, now hooked to an IV and receiving chemo for his lifestyle choices.  The play on words, changing from Joe Camel to Joe Chemo is also an effective method at getting the point across:  Smoking isn’t cool anymore.  Also interesting is the edited version of the small Surgeon General’s warning.  What once read as a descriptor of the primary conditions caused by smoking is now replaced with detrimental effects to characters who smoke.  Spoof ads, although based in humour, are compelling nonetheless, and cater to a wittier generation.

I don’t know how prevalent smoking is amongst teens today, since there have been fairly aggressive PSAs about the dangers of smoking, but I recall that when I was in junior high, the kids who smoked were “the cool kids”.  One has to wonder if that attitude is a reinforcement of the message these ads hoped to push.  My general impression is that society is becoming less excepting of smoking and that’s reflective in the current BC laws restricting smoking to very few areas, so it’d be interesting to see how cigarette advertisements change as society’s view changes.

– Kiran Aujlay

fragile childhood – monsters