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