10/5/17- Katie McGuckin

     Today's class began with Mr. Rivers asking us to examine A.O. Scott's claim about film adaptations, and rewrite his claim in our own words with examples to why we agree or disagree with it.
      A.O. Scott's claim: "Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones...are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker's will."
     Claim rewritten in my own words: Bad adaptations of films are caused because they stray too far or stick too closely to the original, but good adaptations build upon the foundation of characters and plot that inhabited the text, while putting their own spin on it.
     I agreed with Scott's claim because most book adaptations fail because they are unable to stay true to the text or do not utilize the various opportunities that a visual medium offers. Although, I also disagreed with his claim because it was a broad statement that assumed the text being adapted was good. The class' answers were similar and thought that good adaptations should have at least some respect for the original, while being willing to make it their own. An example of a good film adaptation of a novel, was Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, because it followed the characters and events in the story pretty accurately to the book, but added a few minimal changes like switching the setting and order of a few events.
     After discussing Scott's claim, Mr. Rivers began to introduce the class to our next essay. The Intertextuality Essay will directly relate to the text each student chose to read for this class in the summer and require us to watch a film adaptation of it. We have until October 26 to write a 1,000-1,200 word essay that analyzes the changes from the original to the film adaptation and explain why we agree with them or not. For the remaining 10 minutes of class we were given a choice to look over the two sample essays to get a better idea of what the assignment was asking for, or to start pre-writing.