Thursday, July 28; Guest Speaker Sharon Weltman

Thursday, 28 July (9:30-12:30): Dickens on the Twentieth-Century Stage

Guest Speaker: Sharon Weltman, Professor of English, Louisiana State University 


Discussion topics 


•   Dickens’s modern legacies 


•   Melodrama and performance 


•   Dickens today: relevance, inspirations, challenges 


Seminar Discussion

“Like Dracula and Frankenstein, Sweeney Todd will always be with us.”

A class on just Dickens – the suggestion that to know Dickens is to be a “real Victorianist.”

Source text changes as the work goes through various adaptations. Dickens has had a pervasive affect on our understanding of Victorian culture

I.      – Adaptations issues / theory / pedagogy

II.    – Performance issues / theory / pedagogy

III.  – Musical theater

I. Adaptation issues

    a. Letich’s “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism, Volume 45, Number       2, Spring 2003, pp 149-171

            1. There is such a thing as contemporary adaptation theory.

            2. Differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their                         respective media.

            3. Literary texts are verbal, films visual

            4. Novels are better than films.  Can you talk about how the two things work rather than which                     one is better.

            5. Novels deal in concepts, films in precepts

            6. Novels create more complex characters than movies because they offer more immediate and                     complete access to characters’ psychological states.

            7. Cinema’s visual specification usurps its audience’s imagination.

            8. Fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in analyzing adaptations.

            9. Source texts are more original than adaptations.

            10. Adaptations are adapting exactly one text apiece. Every adaptation is adapting another text.

            Early stage adaptations were often performed before the text was completed.  Dickens horrified                   by the early adaptation of Oliver Twist.  The selections that Dickens chose to read during his                     readings were the scenes that became dramatized and well-known. Dickens began working       with playwrights – there were many opportunities for actors and playwrights because of the                      plethora of theaters. This allowed for some control, but not entirely. Dickens approved stage                     productions were played at the higher-class theaters.

            11. Adaptations are inter texts, their precursor texts simply texts.

            12. Adaptation study is a marginal enterprise.

    b. Linda Hutcheon’s idea of theme and variations suggests that the pleasure of consuming (and creating) adaptation derives from “repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with piquancy of surprise” (4)

    Ÿ The adaptation as commentary on or product of its own time

    Ÿ The adaptation as interpretation of source text (but this still subordinates the adaptation)

    (How do industry codes constrain adaptation? Or historical influence? Ex. How do the 1930s affect         the adaptation)

    Fanfiction: not a new concept, but a new term. Merriam-Webster: stories involving popular fictional         characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet —called also fanfic, \-ˈfik\

    https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Charles-Dickens/

c. Paul Davis’s notion of “culture text”: Each adaptation contributes to the whole (also called         “metatext” by Cardwell). Get away form the idea that the source is always “better” than the      adaptation.

    Stewie as Oliver on Family Guy / People know Dickens even if they have never read Dickens.      Oliver Twist the most adapted in the 19^th century. Christmas Carol is the most adapted overall. The third most adapted is Great Expectations.           

    Adaptations adapt previous adaptations as well as (or as much as) the primary source text. Disney’s        Oliver and Company

    TOPIC: Adaptation as political commentary and cultural critique (South African reworking of A Tale of Two Cities during Apartheid and adapting Oliver Twist as commentary on AIDS crisis).

    Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! also reshapes Oliver Twist and its intervening adaptations (particularly       David Lean’s film) as cultural critique? (Bart recreates Fagin as a loveable scamp) Fagin, as            performed by Alec Guiness in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, 1948. Note large prosthetic nose still     realizing Cruikshank’s illustrations – causing a riot in Berlin. Illustrations often create what would           look like a staged scene – a tableaux.

    London 1960 NEW THEATRE, oliver! Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver! Bart was a very poor      Eastender. Songs written to forward the plot. British theater had been typically presenting musical             comedy. Bart transformed the musical to imitate American musicals, similar to Rogers and   Hammerstein or Rogers and Hart. In the musical, there is never any mention as Fagin being Jewish.   After a time, Fagin becomes the main character in manner ways. He is the main leader of the thieves.       The difference between the 1994 London banner and the 2009 London Theater banner: the L in       Oliver becomes a shape of a nose on face of Fagin. The musical gives us a Fagin who cares for the           boys, which is portrayed in the novel.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/05/theater/lionel-bart-68-songwriter-created-the-musical-oliver.html]

    Boy Called Twist, Tim Greene, 2004

    What are the new elements that may be introduced? What are the elements that may be lacking from        the adaptation?

d. Julie Sanders: “adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status, prolonging the life of the source (9).” Adaptations serve to solidify the cultural impact of the source text.

Useful to focus on particular scenes, to think about the adaptation consider how the adapter condenses the text. Adaptations are always interpretations of the text.

PERFORMANCE issues / theory / pedagogy

a.   Dickens as performer and his own performance as a vehicle for writing

b.   Performed identities, shifting identities (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter): Our identities are performed by reiterated acts; identities as constructed. An autobiography is essentially a work of fiction. On stage or in film, there is a human body who performs a role or represents an identity.

c.   Enhanced empathy in watching live performance. Including a live performance in the study of a piece of work shows that students score higher on empathy studies.

d.   Putting oneself in another’s place/skin. Actors want to perform something that they are not. Example: The King and I – Anna was not British, but rather of mixed race.

e.   Inviting students to create and perform an adaptation

            Asking for More: Dickens in Nigeria (2012)

Musical theater and its particular possibilities:

a.     Music as emotional manipulation (maybe not a bad thing?) 1. Melodrama as musical theater and Broadway musicals as melodrama. Movie underscoring. 2. When emotion is too strong to sing, you dance . . .

b.     Information / experience provided through music and dance

c.     What parts of the novels are incipiently theatrical? Musical/theatrical? How would you musicalize particular scenes? How does a single song / dance interpret the novel?

Success! Drood / A Christmas Carol / Oliver

Failures: Hard Times / Copperfield / A Tale of Two Cities

Guest Speaker: Dr. Kate Flint

1.  On Pedagogy:

Don't take an illustration for granted.  There are 5 criteria to consider when viewing illustrations of any kind:  Context, genre, medium, audience, and reaction from the audience.

Remember that all pictures want something from you. The visual is translated into language; language is "seen" visually.  This is a relationship between inner and outer lives.

Try having students interpret peers' illustrations of text.

Show different images to students of characters and ask questions of "accuracy" and interdependence.  Think about how a visual image can open up a text for the student.  What visuals can we use from today to illustrate ideas in the text? What visuals from the 1850's can we use to represent issues in the text and today?

2. On Dickens

Hard Times was published in 1854 without illustrations.  Published again in 1868 with illustrations done by Fredrick Walker.

A Tale of Two Cities (TOTC) Was published in 1859 with and without pictures.  Many serials came with title pages that had illustrations perhaps setting an expectation, perhaps without the illustrator having read the entire novel.  Sometimes illustrators borrowed from other popular images, from contemporaries, from Punch, from landmarks.

Sometimes we misread illustrations (visual red herrings).  It is important to dig deeper and find out if we are placing our own atmosphere, bias, reading, on to an illustration.  Consider book covers:  What thought goes into choosing cover art?  Why is that important to our reading of the text?  What does the process of cutting, cropping, and coloring the cover art do for our reading?  What about scale? What is the job of the book jacket designer?

Critical reception of TOTC (Phiz illustrations) was negative--overlap of illustration vs. characature shops.  William Hogarth influenced Phiz (Hablot Browne) in the over exaggerated style of illustration.  Phiz and Dickens had a close personal and professional relationship.  Nonetheless, the influence of realism in art had become a middle class trend or desire, so readers wanted illustrations built on accuracy or "the text."

What role might accuracy of illustrations play in our own classrooms?  Does it matter if illustrations are text based or if they are imagined?  See Harvey piece for ideas on visualization and how individuals form images of text that are essentially personal and perhaps, original.  It is this space that author and illustrator may have a conversation about the text.  Harvey claims that good fiction writers allow for play with these images. Ambiguity may be essential to giving readers the freedom to read text in their own way.

3. Classroom activity

Kate Flint is allowing us access to her entire PowerPoint via Google Drive.

We split into small groups and looked at different illustrations from Hard Times, discussing the author's choices in what to include and what to leave out.  This was coupled with the Harvey reading.

Wednesday, July 26 - Considering Adaptations

July 26, 2016

Today, Marty led us to consider adaptation in general, as well as how we would adapt A Tale of Two Cities if we were given the task as screenwriters or playwrights.  He began with this question:

What are the challenges of adapting this text (or any text) to the stage or film?

This question led us to consider:

•  The differences between fiction and drama (narration and dialogue vs. staging and scripting)
• Audience – what does a film/play audience demand that may be different from the readers of a novel?
• Time/economy – will you need to simplify storylines and/or emphasize a particular storyline or character?
• Issues of representing elements from the novel that are difficult to show in a three-dimensional setting, such as violence, metaphor, and imagery.
• Casting – who would you put in these parts and why?

Next, Marty asked us, “What makes an adaptation ‘successful’?” This question led us to debate the merits and drawbacks of any adaptation’s fidelity to the novel as well as the variety of purposes an adaptation may have.

These two discussions had primed us well for our next task, to specifically imagine how we would adapt the novel A Tale of Two Cities.  Marty asked us specific questions to that end, which we then discussed:

•       What would you choose as the opening scene?
•       What would you choose as the closing scene?
•       What moment in your adaptation would you use for the greatest emotional impact?
•       What will serve as the most visually rich moment?
•        What theme(s) will you emphasize?
•       What scenes/characters/elements would you remove?
•        What scenes/characters/elements would you add?
•        Why should we see your play/film?

This primed the group to think about what we believe are the essentials of the text.  Next, Marty led the group in composing a list of key scenes.   As we discussed this list, we talked about the function(s) of these essentials scenes to plot, theme, and meaning.  Similarly, we then composed a list of key characters, and coupled with that, a list of characters that could be left out of an adaptation.  Marty then assigned each person a character from the “left out” list and had him or her argue why that character should be included after all.  This led us to consider the purpose and function of each character in the text.

As we went through this entire process, I realized how powerful a tool this lesson is for deepening a student’s understanding of and engagement with a novel.  Answering these questions forced me to consider important elements of Dickens’ craft, including the function and purpose of the narration, each scene, and each character.  It was also very engaging, allowing me a creative outlet and giving me a voice with which to dialogue with the text.  Finally, I also realized that the lesson could be an extremely effective form of student assessment, as success with it requires an in-depth knowledge of the novel.

7/21 Class Notes (Part 1)

·      How do our contemporary experiences of terror complicate our approach to A Tale of Two Cities?

·      How can we use this text as a way to discuss terror with our students?

·      How does the individual define justice outside of what is considered legal?

·      Is there a continuum of morality?

·      Do we have to be beholden to a collective?

Violence is pervasive in A Tale of Two Cities. This novel is a good opportunity to analyze violence with students. Some of our students are shocked by violence, while others are desensitized to it.  Some students are paralyzed by the anger of constantly being stopped and frisked by police, but they feel powerless to protest it.

“Citizens” in A Tale of Two Cities are supposed to participate in mob violence to show their patriotism. Tragedies of World War II and 9/11, help readers imagine 19^th century France, when terror was the norm.  Dickens isn’t advocating vigilante justice, although the death of the Marquis feels like justice. People won’t break away from the status quo if they are counting on a hero to handle the matter. Dickens advocates us all treating each other better as individuals, because mobs cannot be trusted to act justly.  Terrorist acts are violence against collectives because terrorists lose sight of individual peoples humanity. Defarge believes Darnay should be punished for his genetic lineage, she does not acknowledge his individuality. Defarge was raised in a system that encourages violence, and rather than overturn it, she perpetuates it.

The more heroic characters of A Tale of Two Cities however are those who demonstrate self-sacrifice and who are never celebrated. Miss Pross loses her hearing in her battle with Defarge, and Carton loses his life to help Lucie Mannette keep her family together. Carton’s death helps a beautiful city arise because Lucie and Charles’ relationship represent the idealism of a man who gives up his inheritance and woman his is the daughter of a highly moral doctor. On the other hand, the seamstress who is executed alongside Carton, is unsure that her death will lead to a better future. Her experience shows that terror is unmotivated.

Some people think the only appropriate retribution for justice is to inflict violence on a scale equal what has bee inflicted before. However, in Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle says virtue is the middle place between two extremes. The golden mean prevents us from villainizing others. Madame Defarge isn’t just a terrorist, she has clear motives. Madame Defarge’s revolutionary fervor can at times also seem like justice because she avenging violence committed against her family members, but she acts so unjustly that her death also seems justified. Characters like Madame Defarge complicate the hero/ villain binary. Madame Defarge believes she is enacting justice, but other characters see her as a terrorist. Defarge, like Dr. Manette is in fact traumatized. However, while Dr. Manette turns to shoemaking, Defarge lacks resilience and becomes a monster, bent on inflicting violence.