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Alice Reflection

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years ago

Alice Adaptation Project: Reflection

 

Team Members: Salman Bakht, Robin Chin, Sarah Harris, Rama Hoetzlein

 

Table of Contents

Main Page

Project Description

Methodology

Analysis

Reflection

 

 

Reflection

This project has produced a number of potentially significant findings, not only in terms of questioning traditional literary practices of  "close reading," but also in terms of opening up a number of fascinating interdisciplinary and cross-media topics for further study. Adaptation is a complex and highly creative process of breaking, making, and maintaining past and present structures of meaning. It is also, as our ever-expanding Group Results page demonstrates, an idea that easily invites a sort of informative chaos, as its internal contradictions constantly demand a harrowing mixture of "closer" and "more distant" analytical practices.

 

However, in response to this somewhat daunting and "entropic" aspect of investigating Alice and adaptation, our team has successfully adopted a practical research strategy - one not unlike the methods suggested by Willard McCarty and Franco Moretti in their respestive texts, Humanities Computing and Graphs, Maps, Trees. Indeed, by allowing ourselves to experiment with the process of adapting texts, rather than forcing ourselves to work within the limits of a single textual "product," our group has managed both to "capture the dynamic, experiential aspects" of adaptation (McCarty 23), and, in its final stage,  to return to literary close reading with a new, "adapted" literary product.

 

 

Deformance and Literary Adaptation

"By removing ourselves temporarily from the original written work and its literary adaptations, and instead focusing this project on a systematic analysis of our three selected film adaptations of Carroll’s Alice, we hope to be able eventually to return to the original literary work with a new, 'decentered' perspective, and with a new theory on how rules are made, broken, and “adapted” across various media lines." - From the Project Description

 

Having completed two montages based on several film adaptations of Carroll's Alice story, our team sought in the end to follow through on its initial goal of "return[ing] to the original literary work with a new 'decentered' perspective" by creating two specifically literary adaptations of our film montage: two unique transcriptions of our systematically rearranged visual project, both of them crafted using only corresponding "material" form the original Victorian text. The results of this endeavor were as follows:

 

Alice Original Text Excerpt

Description: This except from chapters 1 and 2 of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) provides the base text for the following "montage transcripts." For the complete text of these and other chapters from the original work, please visit this link.

Original Text Excerpt

Top 25 Words (listed by frequency): Alice; little; like; said; way; mouse; went; thought; think; cats; dear; things; oh; know; door; cried; shall; feet; poor; I'll; began; come; table; say.

 

 

Alice Adaptation Montage Transcript #1

Description: This montage transcript attempts to match text from the original excerpt above with each of the film clips represented in our group's "Alice Adaptation" film montage. We began this process by creating a master Word document that identified each montage clip, and which listed below each clip any possible corresponding passages from Carroll's Alice work. After compiling ths master document, we created this edited transcript by eliminating adjacent examples of repetition, and streamlining the adapted text to make it more readable. All the quotes here are directly from the original text, although in certain instances minor punctuation has been added and/or deleted.

 

Adaptation 1 Excerpt

Top 25 Words (listed by frequency): Alice; little; door; curiouser; like; went; passage; moment; suddenly; high; looked; cried; soon; came; time; knelt; small; telescope; inches; led; thought; swam; key; opened; way.

 

 

Alice Adaptation Montage Transcript #2

Description: In contrast to the document above, this montage transcript was created by editing the master Word document with the intention of highlighting all adjacent examples of repetition. As such, it sacrifices readability in order to preserve and applaud the montage’s significant amount of redundancy and pseudo-redundancy. As before, all the quotes here are directly from the original text, although in certain instances minor punctuation has been added and/or deleted.

 

Adaptation 2 Excerpt

 

Top 25 Words (listed by frequency): Alice; little; like; went; door; curiouser; soon; moment; telescope; passage; largest; said; I'm; opening; way; cried; finished; high; inches; small; key; taste; english; suddenly; looked; ventured.

 

 

Thus, by "deforming" the original Alice text, or "adapting" it based on the unique logical structures of our project's film/sound montage creation, our team produced two objects of literary study that may be approached either though traditional close reading practices, or using more "distant" analytical resources, such as the TaPOR Text-Analysis Tools available online (see Group Results Page, or the "Top 25" word lists above).

 

In this case, by focusing on how to change to object of study, rather than the method of studying the object, one still manages to "break" predicted expectations, and inevitably to "make" new theories about what is lost, gained, and preserved in various types of "adaptation."

 

 

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