I did it again. I searched for something on Wikipedia, and did a trail that somehow ended with me reading LOST episode summaries (the season 6 premiere is on Tuesday! Expect me to try to relate "Cuentos de la tierra" to LOST in some way in Wednesday's class).
I also spent a good portion of this week searching around youtube for the exact feeling that the passage I translated in class evoked... the street scene that is shadowy, maybe with lightning, it's raining... where everything just feels spooky. All I ended up finding were clips that freaked me out... so I had to stop watching.
My inability to find a video of what Moratín wrote speaks to what we talked about in class... while artists in the 21st century might use movies or visual imagery to convey a feeling, authors have a much harder task... to describe something with words. I wonder if we've really gone past the era of good, untouched writing. If a book is published, and it is popular, usually a movie comes out in 2-5 years. It makes me wonder if as a society we've moved past being satisfied with the words that authors write, and now need a stronger stimulus to create a feeling within ourselves.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
"I wonder if we've really gone past the era of good, untouched writing."
This is really interesting. I do not think that we've passed this era- at least I sincerely really hope not!! But I think it is an interesting observation about popular books and movies. Harry Potter, for instances, I LOVED the books, because I could create this fantasy world in my head where the characters looked a particular way and said things with a certain attititude, etc. When I saw the movies, it was like, oh, that's what they look like? It was almost like my fantasy bubble had been popped! There is just something about the written word that can not be replaced with books.
Harry Potter is EXACTLY what I was thinking about! I felt that way too-- my experience in reading the books after I saw the first few movies was completely different from when I read the first few novels without Daniel Radcliffe or Maggie Smith in my head.
I feel like any novel that is halfway good or able to be adapted is immediately grabbed up by a movie studio and shopped around to different directors as soon as possible.
This is definitely what is happening with the Percy Jackson novels. "The Lightning Thief," made from the first novel in the series, opens on Feb. 12th. Our son has been an avid reader of these novels, and I read the first three with him. When we saw the posters for the movie, we were both so upset. The guy they cast as Percy looks very much as we'd imagined him, from the descriptions in the novels. But the character Annabeth is supposed to have blonde hair and grey eyes-- and instead, the studios have cast a dark-eyed brunette woman to play Annabeth. It does not seem like her at all!!!
Post a Comment