Apples to Apples A Book-History Approach to Film Adaptations in the Classroom

• Published in: CEA critic Vol. 77; no. 3; pp. 295 - 299
• Main Author: Jackson, Jeffrey E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.11.2015
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); English literature; Film adaptations; Foregrounding; Historical text analysis; Novels; Teaching; Wyler, William (1902-1981); New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 0007-8069; 2327-5898; 2327-5898
• DOI: 10.1353/cea.2015.0029

[...]the early textual scholarship practiced by the so-called New Bibliographers relied on what Finkelstein and McCleery describe as "studying texts and books as physical objects" but in the interest of arriving at "the most complete and least corrupted version of a text possible" (8). The process reveals how the serial structure of Oliver Twist regularly and conspicuously ends monthly parts with Oliver himself in a death-like state-a "little death" or petit mort, as it were-from which he is, happily, revived at the start of the next month's installment. [...]the first monthly number ends by foregrounding the possibility of Oliver's death: as the white-waistcoat-clad member of the workhouse board declares, "I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than I am now that that boy will come to be hung," and the narrator then leaves it open "whether the life of Oliver Twist will be a long or a short piece of biography" (17; bk. 1, ch. 2).\n In the potentially haunted chamber at Wuthering Heights, books are insistently physical presences-one book catches fire on Lockwood's candle, filling the room with an "odour of roasted calf-skin" (38), and he later constructs a barricade of books to keep Cathy's ghost at bay.