Vision/Re-Vision
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Overview
The essays in Vision/Re-Vision analyze in detail ten popular and important films adapted from contemporary American fiction by women, addressing the ways in which the writers' latent or overt feminist messages are reinterpreted by the filmmakers who bring them to the screen, demonstrating that there is much to praise as well as much to fault in the adaptations and that the process of adaptation itself is instructive rather than destructive, since it enriches understanding about both media.
Synopsis
The essays in Vision/Re-Vision analyze in detail ten popular and important films adapted from contemporary American fiction by women, addressing the ways in which the writers' latent or overt feminist messages are reinterpreted by the filmmakers who bring them to the screen, demonstrating that there is much to praise as well as much to fault in the adaptations and that the process of adaptation itself is instructive rather than destructive, since it enriches understanding about both media.
Library Journal
Whenever literature makes it to the screen, the usual hue and cry of infidelity may be heard, and it echoes here in this collection of essays on contemporary adaptations of women's writing. Most of the authors here tentatively privilege source materials and disdain departures. There are occasions when adaptations nearly eclipse their originals (The Accidental Tourist) and instances of fruitful reinterpretation (In Country). The problem is that when film universalizes, it very often trivializes. Not surprisingly, controversies are eschewed, plots condensed, characters flattened, and themes sanitizedpeccadilloes that plague most adaptations. Editor Lupack (Take 2, Bowling Green Univ. Popular Pr., 1994) has published other essays on adaptation; in this case, women's writing serves as a rubric. Because contributors include professors and Ph.D. candidates in English, this has less to do with film theory than with literary criticism. For academic libraries with strong film collections.Jayne Kate Plymale-Jackson, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens