James Joyce's interest in theater and cinema have led many to assume that both have heavily influenced his work. While such an assumption is somewhat valid, it ignores those characteristics of Joyce's fiction that are distinctly theatrical rather than cinematic--his reliance on dialogue over description, and thus the word over the image, and his panoramic rather than closeup vision--as well as the major differences between the theater and the cinema. Furthermore, by asserting that cinema influenced Joyce, critics ignore the fact that when cinema was beginning to implement the techniques they find in Joyce's work, Joyce had already written Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and most of Ulysses This study explores the cinematographic versus theatrical characteristics of Joyce's novels by examining his techniques in light of the distinguishing characeristics of the two genres. I use dramatic adaptations of his prose works to demonstrate that these techniques are indeed ones that operate in the genres themselves, recognizing that while adaptations are somewhat influenced by the skill of the adaptor, the portions of an adaptation which work well or badly do so partly because of the original. This is especially true of the adaptations I have chosen because most of them lift whole sections of the novels virtually unchanged, making the adaptations even more useful as gauges of the theatrical or cinematic characteristics of their originals I consider three adaptations of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Joseph Strick's film (same title), Hugh Leonard's Stephen D, and Phoebe Brand, John Randolph, and Frederick Ewen's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (All three also draw some of their material from Stephen Hero.) For Ulysses, I consider six adaptations: Joseph Strick's film Ulysses, Eamon Morrissey's Joycemen, Joseph Carroll's Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops, Donna Wilshire's Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, Marjorie Barkentin's Ulysses in Nighttown, and Louis Zukofsky's unpublished filmscript. For Finnegans Wake, I consider five adaptations: Mary Ellen Bute's film adaptation by the same title, Davie Heefner's play by the same title, Mary Manning's The Voice of Shem, Jean Erdman's Coach with the Six Insides, and Stuart Gilbert's unproduced scenario for Anna Livia Plurabelle / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23568 |
| Date | January 1986 |
| Contributors | Gonzales, Deborah Martin (Author) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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