Woke English 17

[Literature and The Social World 27/2/25:

Transcript:

First of all, welcome back from time, so welcome back. First of all, just a reminder that the updated full version of the semester student portfolio assignment is now available on Canvas which is detailing the whole section A which is first half portfolio which is the field work on the field work event and the second half which involves two short responses to questions set by lecturers on various modules asking you to respond specifically to materials on this module. So just again a reminder the week 11 so that's Friday the 28th I must say 28th of March. You will be handing yourself our submission Canvas Pain, section A field work and section B. Two need to be short responses, one from first half semester and one from the sequence of lectures. I just first wanted to check in. Did anyone have any specific questions that has come up about the assignments?  So put all of the answers to the three questions in the same word document. Yes please. So same word document that also includes a standard coverage sheet and of course an overall bibliography at the end.  That doesn't count and please do please make sure you upload the correct document as well. The only thing that you check in on and many of you consulting with me are field work events. You can also check with various lecturers accordingly.  Just generally speaking we've been fairly flexible about the aspects like location and type of event. As long as the student appears to making a good case for that they attended something they think we're interested and that they just a reminder once again that field work reflection is not a diary. It's not like your diary at a great time or hate patientness. But your personal responses will of course be part of the data you discuss and analyze. It's not really new, but your analysis how effective it is the event was as a as a queer cultural event will probably shape your own reflection of your experience and what you're thinking that event is doing our sale with central ideas reminder to you should make the link specifically to material at least one concept idea reading point from this semester's part of the module, the welcome form material from last semester and the five as you discuss those events. But you will need to show some sense that we use the material this semester for think about then in section B just a reminder that there you're asked to do two very short pieces. So in successful one exam you were given a limited time frame in which you were assessed by find out how much you would pack into that limited time frame. You can see this is another type of assessment quite a lot of time, but you're going to need to think how to make loads of the limited word count and how best therefore to make every sentence count, so to speak. So again a reminder. Assume our knowledge of books, the music memoir, the we're discussing don't tell us plot, don't sort of generalizations focus on picking specific scenes, moments, mistes of music, key passages and telling it and halfway half those now does.

Any other questions? How do you. Actually I was going to check there is MLA guidance for sighting events but usually you're just kind of writing down you know, performance of eggs production event and check the MLA handbook it has a number of different options.

It depends on the type of event it's choice be s entry in the website but there are a number. There are a number of ways to cite a cultural event depending on the title event, if there's a specific performer if you're citing a film depending on which aspect of the film you're talking about that's how you can cite it.

If we're talking about the direction as the directive if we're talking about script then it's a script writer. The concept that we use as like our main focus does it have to be something that was mentioned in the lecture? Because that's something that is very interesting to me but it's just in the reading and it wasn't mentioned in the lecture. I think as long as it's guiding actually from the learning materials for this semester.

So if it's something that's come up from material that you'd be reading that's I continue to be available for consultation and I'm going to have to take off too much more of your time. So it's a great pleasure is adaptation in our discussion on writing the new item last semester and we looking forward to hearing. Thank you very much. Hello. Hi. I am in my name if you're wondering. I'm from Turkey so it's a Turkish name. I don't need that detail. Probably will have the number. Thank you for Marine for that introduction and clarification on the assignments. So this week we're starting the the lectures on adaptation theory and why we have a theory of adaptation and how does that connect with different forms of art, particularly literature and obviously film.

So I will go through a few anecdotes in terms of how the field of adaptation studies emerged.  Kind of give you a bit of an overview of the cinema as an art form, how it develops and its relationship with other text based art forms like literature, black poetry, black plays and we'll have hopefully at the end of the lecture we'll have a general style of why there has been this confounded and a bit of a negativity around the idea of adaptation and the kind of constant debates around the original being always better than the second.

Second, the second version of the. So we're going to talk about how this discourse around literature being more valued culturally than other screen based art forms, how this discourse that has a negative, negative hierarchy, the art of it, has emerged and what kind of ideas in modernity has left these conceptions about the higher cultural hierarchies around different art forms.

So we're going to talk about the emergence of media, different media formats.

But I want to. Before we kind of get to that overview, I'd like to mention that there is a whole interdisciplinary field called adaptation studies now and researching universities from undergrads programs, even called adaptation studies.

It is, it's by nature interdisciplinary. What does. How does a field of study become a field of study? They kind of start. You'll start having multiple different introduction books to you and then the case studies will multiply and then you'll end up having an academic journal dedicated to the study itself and people specializing in that and individual modules being offered under.

Under this field of study. So we're talking about a very vast range of interests when we talk about adaptation studies.

And naturally we kind of think about adaptation in general from literature to school.

So that's the kind of dominant common form of adaptation you think of.

Whereas adaptation studies can include a lot of different forms and multi directional ways of stories being exchanged between different art forms.

We're talking about real life stories, journalism plays, we're talking about video games, television, C, you name it.

So we kind of talk about like a big area. Because of the multiplication of video formats, the need, necessity for such a field emerged and I just kind of put a kind of screenshot of a Google search.

I just did kind of like adaptation studies books and you can see that there are just so many of them that led to the emergence of the journalist stuff dedicated to it.

But we are not necessarily concerned with this kind of because it's a huge field that it would be really hard to kind of find place in it and study.

So what I would like to do is start with a personal anecdote with my own experience with trying to write within this field and then move on to the historical, historical trajectory of cinema as an art form and how it set from text to text based arts.

So when I was doing my masters 12, 13 years ago, I took an adaptation module from the German department Even though I can speak German or if you studies that German lecturer was offering the course. And we were focusing on different types of adaptation to screen. And it didn't only involve famous filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock's adaptations of canonical novels.

It also involved looking at journalistic thesis on real life stories, looking at how real life stories of certain murderers being documented in news, on how those stories travel from documentary making to fictional adaptations.

So you are tracing what gets adapted and what medium, what kind of interconnected concepts are at work in terms of the story to become adapted into a specific medium.

So there are a lot of different parameters. We are talking about the way things get adapted from one place to another.

What I. I also had this misconception, even though this French philosopher could call John John Luc Nancy wrote a piece called the Intruder.

And he talks about his heart transplant plan experience where he almost died in a heart in transplant.

And he kind of fills the voices his experience of giving a heart transplant in a way that's like somebody else's heart and now it's mine.

What does that mean? What do you want me to carry someone else's heart and my survival depending on someone else's heart.

So thinking about someone else otherness as fundamental to anyone's survival.

So he was the kind strange, the intruder, the other being fundamental to our development of a sense of self.

So I was kind of fascinated by this as an immigrant, obviously.

And at the time there was a lot of. He wrote this in 1991. So it was a lot of border control being heightened in Europe.

And immigration was a big mythical thing about this period of so hard, especially in France, where he loves text.

So he was also connecting this idea of being truer to immigration and fear of the other, fear of the immigrant being truer, coming into your home and intruding your life and your being.

So he was kind of like saying that it's actually what's constituted of our sense of self because we are always one way or another, another to another.

So it's kind of that kind of politicalizing of the immigration ideas around border control in terms of his own body.

So I'm a French filmmaker called Claire Denis made a film based on that book.

So I was kind of like, obviously take. Really loved Claire Denis. And I wanted to write my final essay on this adaptation.

That it's not necessarily a novel or a play, but it's a philosophical text, perhaps a bit academic in a way, and sometimes personal autobiographical in the case of Nancy's work.

So it's kind of like, let's say academic autobiographic text that you wrote and then you have a fiction film.

So I kind of like really into this. But I obviously kind of spoke to him personally. But also I thought that this engagement was also really of adaptation.

Because he also talks about how his body needed to adapt to the new heart without rejecting it.

His body was reacting to the heart in different ways.

And he was like, okay, I was in the process of adaptation bodily with this new heart to be able to survive.

So he was kind of commenting on this idea of adaptation in terms of bodily functioning.

So I thought it was kind of connected to the idea of adaptation in general.

It said something about the form process. But I also had the misconception that I was like, well, you know, everybody writes about from novel to film or holy books to film.

So I'm going to write most of you could text being adapted into a film.

So it kind of felt like that that would be more valued than let's say talking about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.

And I was totally mistaken. And now I can see that. But at the time it was more fascinating to work on such philosophical work than popular cult.

So what happens there in terms of what happens to adaptation as a form, as a format between different.

Between different mediums? It was quite before the 18th century. Western civilization is kind of blooming. Adaptation was actually everywhere. A lot of folk art, poems, poetry, Victorian era is all about entertainment.

It's all circles around adaptation. Even so you see that I have a quote from Linda Chion there, whose book is under.

You can find it under your museum. And I recommend to read the at least three face. And that would give you an idea of how we approach adaptation as not hierarchical, but more in terms of communication.

So even when you think about mythology, the kind of groups of literature, in a way was that there were a lot of adaptations of different types of treatments, other types of mythologies.

So adaptation has always been at the center of textual arts.

But what happened now that adaptation became something that wasn't necessarily cool, that was necessarily needed.

When the greatest original existed. Why did you read an opaque bad versions of it? So we can trace this back to modernity. Somebody said, I think therefore I am. Can anyone remember who said that? Descartes, who's a philosopher, who came up with this card dualism in terms of experience.

At this point, defining human experience is that he said that there is the mind and there is the body.

So he told these two elements made up what we think as human.

So if I am thinking and I Exist and my body is its evidence.

And this dualism led to a lot of aesthetic and artistic kind of interventions and kind of philosophies.

Which led to the kind of higher actually being worse than the image.

So when you separate the mind and the body in such a drastic way, what happens is that there's a disconnect between the materiality of your body and then your imagination.

That it is something abstract, it's not something material.

So that these two realms of human experience had been separated.

And what else happened was that there is like the kind of growth of literature.

After reprinting methodologies that traveled as became reproduction became more possible in different forms.

That was featured as a novel, as an artistic production.

Time of is growing a lot as an entertainment. And now this idea of individuality. With the advance of scientific and technological inventions.

That needed human labor. And changed people's lives in drastic ways. So the individual as the consumer, not the producer.

Became the kind of the main phenomena of modern life in the 18th century.

From 18th century to late 19th century. And there is modern dualism. Because modernity is a vast like period of history.

So I'm not going to go into the kind of different eras of it.

Or what we call modernity. But we're basically talking about a large historical era.

From the Renaissance, from the 17th century to now, basically late modernism.

Where digital technologies have become very accessible.

And part like an integral part of our lives. In this trajectory, what happened was this dual idea of our mind and thinking is different than our.

What do we experience is that the hierarchy started emerging between the image and the text.

So text would be associated with something that to do with logic, to do with communication, to do with reality.

And then camera became like a kind of a scientific camera started.

Was a scientific evolution. So there were a lot of like ideas and movements that challenged this journalism by different theories such as psychoanalysis.

Like people who studied the human mind started thinking about that there is actually a subconscious and unconscious area of human experience.

That connects the body and the mind. So your social environment, your upbringing, physical environment.

What you experienced when you were growing up. Haven't experienced of the way your mind works. So like psychoanalysis and the paradigm came to challenge this idea that the body is disconnected from the mind.

And then you have political movements like communism.

That kind of centralize labor force as the kind of center of the human experience.

That the body, the kind of the labor the body can provide.

Becomes a decisive parameter. And deciding what kind of humans are valuable. And then you have other kind of forms, theater. Because like Kind of highlighting the performative aspects of life.

And then more familiar to us maybe is the kind of postmodern ideas around how production hockeys and representation became a sensitive experience of human.

Human life in general. So where is that original? Is there. Is there an authentic self? Or is it all about representation? Conflict in postmodernism and within this trajectory, in the kind of start of like the late modernism, you have the photographic invention and different types of devices being developed for scientific purposes.

So it was mostly about documenting, capturing certain.

Certain things that weren't visible to the eye. So the kind of the start of moving image was more so like a scientific experimentation that then was realized that it could be part of the entertainment industry, it could be part of the water world where I t shirt theater and so on.

One of your readings for these two weeks is the Silent Medium in the Moving Pictures by a cultural theorist from 1934, which is right after this sound cinema has emerged.

So cinema was the first silence. There was no soundtrack. And then sound came about and Hollywood, American cinema started to dominate the cultural sphere all over the world.

So it was kind of like at the peak of like Hollywood becoming a monetary industry American.

Stanley, for me, the dominator of the culture sphere around this time.

He wrote his text and talks a lot, from Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse to Charlie Chaplin to theater plays being adapted.

So he kind of like covers a lot of ground by the kind of what happens in terms of cinema becoming its own art form that can be considered as a format on its own.

Because in the earlier times people were kind of either saying it's like photography, it's like theater.

A lot of people rejected it for its. For its movement capturing ability. That people thought that especially in kind of religious spheres, that the kind of movement is to do with the human body and it shouldn't be replicated to technological objects.

So I kind of put this gif. Whatever you say here is like the. One of the first. How many of you have seen this before? What's the motion? Cool. Yeah. Half the class is familiar, but it's like first ever stop motion thing that is every time.

So it's basically also being slideshow. So this kind of era started kind of. It's like your cinema of attraction. So so what happened was like it was. It became. Cinema became about capturing movements. So movement is to do with the body. So comedy, slapstick, bodily pleasures were the kind of at the.

At the center of any kind of cinematic production.

And then you can think of like whatever image you have in your mind.

When I Say silent films generally are exaggerated acting, contextual cards coming in intersected between a moving image to tell the audience what's going on in the story.

Because there's no sound, there is a kind of a comicality to the characters, bodies, how they move them.

So this kind of cinema was more associated with kind of bodily pleasures like the laughter or even like kind of pornographic production goes as early as the.

The kind of start of cinema. So what happens then is that cinema becomes associated with the kind of globe art.

So it's kind of variety shows. It's not for the. For the elite, it's not for the bourgeoisie, it's more for the mass masses to entertain themselves.

It's. So it was kind of regarded as lower than other forms where literature kind of remained the text, the art of literature remained as more as the carrier, the carrier of logic's carrier of imagination, art history.

Whereas cinema movement was kind of considered as like not able for capturing the capabilities of the human mind by focusing on the body.

What happened then was like a lot of filmmakers kind of challenged this charity chap and he's one of them.

So what he did was to. To kind of use this idea of plastic as the law of art, to point out how bodily movement, the comedy of the body can become a tool to disrupt the dominant system.

Which was obviously he was talking about a time where there is mass production happening and start of capitalism and people are working to loan powers and factories are being built constantly next to roads and autobalance.

And so it's kind of like we're kind of talking about a time where production and consumption are being circulated, advocated by American culture.

And Hollywood was a place for that as well. So Charles Sutton from inside the Industry started kind of using this slapstick, using the law of art to comment on the role of the factory work, the role of the mundane people in the streets, the role of the poverty in the way people started telling stories in the masses.

So he was kind of like challenging this hierarchy by using it.

So that's why I want to show you a little clip and we are going to talk a little bit more about theory of adaptation after you kind of have this idea that cinema starts to become a device for critique, the critique of modernism, the critique of the idea that there is high art and there is low art.

The idea that people who can go to schools and can read and write and produce art and educate themselves are better than the people who cannot, who are kind of bound to work in factories.

So they're set simple, they. They Go to border wheels, they're going to laugh.

So we're kind of talking about this kind of crystallization of how human life is structured.

It's that type of era. So we're going to talk about how theory of adaptation engages.

We've had a little bit more after this. God. So I just gave this clip as an example of how this dichotomy between the image and the text and the body and the mind, aesthetics and logics, these kind of dualisms have been challenged.

And Charlie Chaplin as a filmmaker has been an important figure in dual doing so.

So we come to our other reading in the Hajjan, again, Theory of Adaptation, where she also traverses between different formats.

But what she does importantly there in that book is that she establishes audiences and the audience experience as fundamental as the artists work in the way adaptation works.

So how audiences engage with the work itself are going to be our concern.

But this also brings the kind of audience's environment.

So your kind of upbringing, history of education, history of any kind of experiences you have, social life, your work, all of this will have an effect in the way you're going to engage with any art form.

And this brings us to how our current contemporary life is also a bit challenging to the students.

And she kind of talks about new technologies and the discussion around how film adaptation of a literary work has been kind of defined by this idea of fidelity.

So how true the film adaptation is to the original text has been the kind of the main concern of any kind of critical consideration of an adaptation.

So we are coming from like a critical perspective together within the Hai Chaon.

And a lot of adaptation studies scholars will be critical of this popular discourse around how the film adaptation can never be as true to the original.

This hierarchy is the kind of a point of critique for a lot of adaptations because.

And she also mentions how new technologies like creating fantastical worlds with cgi, AI and a lot of digital production methods that made the issue of fidelity even kind of heightened in certain ways.

Because now we are now talking about how loyal the film screen representation to the text, to the text itself, whatever the text says.

But now we're talking about how loyal they can be to the audience's imagination of the fantastic world.

So we need to think about. She gives the example of, again, a lot of the film adaptations of serials, of books like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Fantastic books being adapted to screen using a lot of digital technologies make the issue of fidelity another problem again in our contemporary world.

But it also highlights it that it's not necessarily a useful paradigm to think about how adaptation can work within our culture.

What does it mean for us to have a difference between our imagination and how somebody else's imagination visualized the same story?

So that experience itself can be useful, according to her, to understand the value of a text, understand the effect, the impact, the critical or harmful ideas that we send can carry on through circulation of screens and different media formats.

So she's kind of like very careful in underlining that we need to look at the audience experience, but also how these differences are, these disappointments are these negativity is also expressed.

So she looks at social media. So it's kind of an interesting way of approaching adaptation.

So what she does now to describe it as a polymistic thing.

Does anyone know what a palimpsest is? Anyone who wants to tell us what it is? Somebody? Yes. A book that's been scraped clean of my script content.

Yes. So the same. The book is kind of emptied out and then there's another text on it and then there's another text.

So it's kind of like the method of using old paper.

But also there are other versions of. Of these words. But in this context of is that you need to think about how each time there is an occurrence of the same, the story or whatever is being adapted, the subject, there's a new occurrence of the subject becoming something else.

So rather than thinking about the second as a secondary, we think about the second as a thing on its own as well.

So kind of thinking of the second as a thing on its own will help us to understand why the second existed in the first place, which will tell us about the kind of economical background of the medium, but also audiences, habits, how media works.

So it's kind of useful. So I can. I think we're kind of almost there. From next week, we're going to look at what gets adapted, why certain texts have been more popular than others.

Certain, like Shakespeare plays, for example, are still continuing to be the most adapted texts English language.

And there's one text, the Tempest by Shakespeare was particularly popular for screens and screen makers.

And I also want you to watch this film adaptation.

Anyone who has seen Adaptation by Scott Jones. 1, 2, 3 out of 300 is it? I put it on canvas, so it's basically all notable.

Detailed Summary of Lecture on Adaptation Theory and Cultural Studies

• The lecture starts with a reminder about the semester student portfolio assignment available on Canvas, which includes:

  • Section A: Fieldwork related to specific events.

  • Section B: Two short responses to questions from various modules.

  • Students must submit a single document containing all answers, a coverage sheet, and an overall bibliography.

  • Emphasis that reflections should be analytical rather than personal diary entries.

• Transition into discussion of adaptation theory:

  • Adaptation studies is interdisciplinary, connecting literature and film.

  • Growth of research has led to dedicated journals and academic programs in adaptation studies.

  • Field includes various media like journalism and video games, broadening the concept of adaptation.

• Personal experience shared regarding adaptation studies:

  • The speaker took a module focused on different types of adaptation, analyzing how real-life stories are transformed into fiction.

  • A theoretical framework from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is mentioned, exploring identity through experience and otherness.

• Historical context of adaptation is outlined:

  • Adaptation has evolved from folklore to modern contexts.

  • The impact of dualism (mind vs body) on cultural narratives and perceptions of art forms is discussed.

  • A critique emerges regarding the hierarchy that sees literature as superior to screen adaptations.

• Examination of cinema's evolution:

  • Initially regarded as a lower form of art, cinema challenges existing artistic hierarchies over time.

  • Notable filmmakers, e.g., Charlie Chaplin, use humor and physical expressions to address social issues.

• Emphasis on audience experience:

  • The concept of fidelity in adaptations is critiqued, shifting focus to audience engagement with the material.

  • Adaptations should be viewed as unique works rather than inferior versions of originals.

• Final thoughts introduced:

  • Importance of understanding how adaptations influence cultural perceptions and artistic values.

  • The discussion concludes with questions about why certain texts, like those of Shakespeare, remain popular sources for adaptation.