02.05.07
Austen in the Classroom
In her essay “Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility as a Gateway to Austen’s Novel,: M. Casey Diana recounts her experience with her Introduction to Fiction (English 103) course at the University of Illinois. In an effort to determine if “we are doing them [students] a disservice by allowing them access to film, especially before they have had a chance to experience the literary text” (140). Diana divided her class into two groups; one group would watch the movie and then read the novel, and the other would read the novel and then watch the movie. Afterwards, students “took a comprehension quiz, wrote a 250-word essay, and filled out a questionnaire designed to ascertain which medium…engaged them more” (140). Reviewing the results of the questionnaires, Diana determined that “students who viewed the film followed the plot far more closely, had a deeper involvement with and readily differentiated between characters, and remembered a great amount of detail than did the readers” (141). Diana goes on to discuss why the students who watched the film first “yearn[ed] to expand upon the delight the movie induced” (145). Diana determined there were three reasons for students enjoyment of a story 180 years old and what they would have enjoyed about the story had they lived in the time period: “strong identification with characters, a longing to return to a simpler era, and a desire for love and romance” (145). Diana concludes noting that she believes this adaptation of Sense and Sensibility “provides a gateway to a positive reading experience” (147) and hopes it will encourage more students to pursue a study of Austen.
While I found Diana’s essay interesting, I believe she neglected to note students previous exposure to Austen novels or novels of the same period. Also, as an introductory course in English, there were probably many students who did not desire to study literature in any form and would thus have preferred the film. While Diana placed students who had previously seen the film into the group that watched the film first, she didn’t factor in the number of times they had seen the film into how well the film group remembered setting and plot details. Other than that, I found Diana’s conclusions interesting, but not particularly pertinent to our study of film adaptations of Austen’s work.