Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
15 - Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
In one of the more surprising current-day mentions of an eighteenth-century work, a 2013 Vulture article on Terrence Malick's 2012 film, To the Wonder, names Pamela (1740) as central to the film:
One odd but telling reference point Malick gave his editors was Margaret A. Doody's introduction to the Penguin Books edition of Samuel Richardson's revolutionary 1740 novel Pamela. In the intro, Doody discusses the fact that Richardson's novel, which unfolds as a series of letters, presents an internalized narrative that appears, on the surface, to lack any and all artifice. “He loves the formless, the radiant zigzag becoming,” Doody writes, and the phrase “radiant zigzag becoming” soon became an unofficial motto for the film, representing its constant sense of movement and the fact that the characters’ relationships seem to always be in flux.
Malick's film, which primarily portrays the beginnings of a passionate love affair between Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) in twenty- first-century Paris and its subsequent breakdown in Oklahoma, certainly is not an adaptation of Pamela in terms of its story; rather, as Malick states, the film adapts the narrative effect of unmediated life created by Pamela's episto- lary form, a cinematic version of “writing to the moment.”
Discovering the connection between Pamela and To the Wonder led me to wonder what it might do to consider adaptation in terms of narrative effect and form, rather than in terms of story, when thinking about and teaching eighteenth-century texts. With that objective in mind, this chapter first con- siders how we might define such adaptations. Second, it considers Pamela and To the Wonder as a case study of how adaptation of narrative effect and form is peculiarly well suited to teaching eighteenth-century literature.
Teaching adaptations that focus on narrative effect and form can be particularly helpful to students, often more helpful, I suggest, than teach- ing more traditional adaptations. These days, thinking about why and how to teach any adaptation in the classroom requires justification. Not only do most of us teach at institutions where the increasing pressures to assess a course's transferable skills mean that we must defend our every syllabus choice, but most of us know that we cannot rely on our students experienc- ing the pleasure of recognition, or at least of immediate recognition, that so many theorists of adaptation position as essential to enjoyment and pur- pose.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Adapting the Eighteenth CenturyA Handbook of Pedagogies and Practices, pp. 234 - 249Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020