What a Novel Can Do That Film and TV can’t: are movies really justifying literature?

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to justify the advantages of reading in the era of technology where technology has replaced habit of reading as well as appreciating literature. My purpose of researching this topic is to bring change in the society about reading, appreciating and understanding life through literature. There is a famous quote, Literature is the mirror of society. So, it’s easy to understand life through literature. Over the last decade or so, I’ve begun to think hard about the differences between the novel as a narrative form and its adaptation of film. Writing about the relationship between Film and Literature deserves more than a cursory look at the two media individually because they constitute a great deal of the discourse in the areas of literary studies and the performing arts. In academic circles, there is an enormous interest in the exchanges between Film and Literature which are critically studied from various perspectives. There have been debates that have addressed such relations and exchanges between the two media since the beginning of the relations and exchanges between the two media since the beginning of the twentieth century. Such significant debates, as the historical evolution of the relationship between Film and Literature, the several methods and issues surrounding those relations, constituted discourse[s] on issues of genres and practices such as poetry and movies, film scripts as literature, or the relation between adaptation and popular culture etc. which are currently taking the center stage, within academic circles. Film is considered as a branch of literature. Filmmakers are indebted to literature in a wide variety of ways. Since literature is a narrative art intent upon creating images and sounds in the reader’s mind, then film is obviously literary- an extension of the older narrative arts. But to me, these films sometimes lost the real crux of the depth of theme. How can we forget, Reading is to the mind, what Exercise is to the body? The paper will study if film makers justified the literary books in making their movies as it is making a wrong effect on readers mind. The focus group is my 50 undergrad students who have not read Macbeth but painted image of protagonist by seeing a Bollywoodian movie based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.