Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The relationship between literature and film has been the subject of numerous reflections and analyses. Despite their diversity, most of these researches have a common starting-point. Both literature and cinema have been regarded essentially as modes of expression , sites and ways of manifestation of an ability to give shape to ideas, feelings, and personal orientations; in other words, as sites in which an individual's perceptions are combined with the person's will/necessity to offer an image of him or herself and of his or her own world. As a consequence, many of these contributions employ, as their key concepts, notions such as “work,” “author,” “poetics,” and “intention.” These notions focus on the presence of an individual's work and, simultaneously, on the fact that a text testifies to it; they emphasize the unfolding of personal actions and a personal universe, and the additional idea of being the repository of the text's deepest identity. Among the reasons that have permitted this approach to become dominant, one in particular stands out: the desire to “valorize” cinema as an art form and as an object of inquiry; that is, the recognition of its “artistic value,” a privilege that other fields, and in particular literature, have had for a long time. This desire, which is apparent in critical writings from the 1920s to the 1980s, has led to the application of categories used ... log in or subscribe to read full text