by Gracie Bain
Introduction:
Students often have trouble with the concept of genre and understanding the rhetorical conventions that go with genre changes. Adaptations (the way novels are adapted into film, etc) are a great framework for this discussion.
What using adaptations does:
- Students think about how and why changes are made:
- Audience change
- Genre change
- Language change
- Purpose change
- Exigence change
- Generic conventions
What using adaptations doesn’t do:
- Serve as a fidelity argument
The Activity:
I use The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde because it is a text that is part of my research. It can work with any text you are familiar with!
First, I let students read an excerpt from Stevenson’s novel–specifically the section that describes the transition from Hyde to Jekyll. We talk about the language the author uses, the audience of the text, and the rhetorical situation surrounding that text.
Next, I play various clips of film adaptations of the transformation scene. For example, many of the films from the silent era (and our current one) are great texts to discuss racism in its portrayals of Hyde’s “monstrosity.” For each clip, we talk about the changes the adapter made to Stevenson’s novel and why they make those changes. I show clips ranging from the 1920s to 2017, and I have found that such a wide range of texts is useful in getting the students interested. I also show graphic novel examples or other forms of media.
Finally, I have my students make memes of the transformation scene using an online meme maker and ask them to reflect on the rhetorical choices they made to adapt the text into a different genre.
Reflection:
I have used a form of this lesson for a World Literature class, so my students had already read Stevenson’s novel. It might be a bit harder to have the students create their own adaptation if they weren’t familiar with the text, but I think it can be done if it is a text most people are aware of!
Gracie is a PhD student at UARK.
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