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There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderlines is the true method.
--Herman Melville
When in my first year teaching upper school English I was called on to create a third trimester elective for seniors, the idea of resorting to the careful, the ordinary, and the merely literary seemed foolhardy in the extreme. Only three months away from receiving the piece of paper that will prove that they know it all, third trimester seniors tend to roll their eyes when presented with such mundane and tired activities as making a thorough examination of a character or exploring the development of a theme in a novel. I mean, come on, that's so junior year.
In an effort to create a course both challenging and engaging, I decided to widen the net, drawing in texts of various literary genres and various media. My hope was that the richness and variety of the texts would foster an equally diverse and fruitful discussion among the members of the class about the way that the medium and genre of a text both enable and define how meaning can be created. At the heart of the course was a multifaceted question about the ways in which literary genres such as plays, short stories, and novels have influenced the development of the language of film.
In order to foster an innovative way of looking at film and literature, I wanted to call into question two common assumptions about books that are made into movies: (1) the idea that a movie never lives up to the book, and (2) the notion that in order to make a "good" movie you need to begin with a "bad" (i.e. popular, pulp, etc.) book. In their place I proposed the idea that film revisions of literature are just another means of critical interpretation, even-- dare I say it?-kissing cousins of the notorious analytical essay.
Three important elements were vital to encompassing the diverse goals and texts of the class: learning to read film, focusing on a process of interpretation between texts, and writing across genres. Before we could begin to discuss how specific films interpret the works of literature on which they are based, the students needed a framework for interpreting film that would enable...