When I was a child, and my dad was a theater grad student, he adapted a couple of short stories into plays (one was Walter Wangerin Jr.’s “Lily” and the other was Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”). I remember the plays only hazily, but I was always struck by how interesting it was to shift the genre. It’s certainly something that filmmakers do all the time – how many film versions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are there, after all?
Sometimes we complain about adaptations – some of us feel that they’re misrepresentations of the work on the page. Ultimately, though, they’re interpretations. It’s obvious that a Shakespearean adaptation is an interpretation – it’s drama, so it’s meant to be interpreted. But shifting from one non-performance genre to another – a short story to a play, a poem to prose – might seem like something that we purists don’t really like (and I admit to often being one of those purists).
However, I think that we can use that genre shift in the classroom. Some of the other bloggers here have suggested encouraging students to shift genres in their own creative writing. I think we should consider doing it from time to time in the literature classroom as well. Having students rewrite something – or even act out something – as a classroom exercise is an interpretive act that requires them to pay attention to details and pay attention to theme. It can help students untangle that which they find confusing.
In my own classroom, I always teach Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” like this. I’m not the first person to do this – and I hope I’m not the last – but I have my students read the story aloud as if we’re reading a play, an idea that I picked up somewhere in my years of teaching introduction to fiction. I have three students volunteer to read the parts of the American, Jig, and the waitress (the last one’s a pretty easy sell with the students), and I read the part of the narrator. I’ve photocopied the story and highlighted each part, as if it were a play script, which I distribute to my readers. And then we get to it.
The experience is always revealing. Sometimes it reveals who has and has not read among the students willing to participate – more than once a willing male student has unknowingly volunteered to be Jig, and I let that happen. But most of all, it reveals to the students the necessity of careful reading. This is one of Hemingway’s stories where you can lose track of who is speaking – and when I’ve taught the story without having students read the parts, that’s exactly what’s happened. Thus, on the level of basic comprehension of the story, it helps to have separate voices reading the parts.
But I think it helps more than that. This is an excellent story to show students how much attention they need to pay to small details – a reason my fellow blogger, William Bradley, teaches this story early in an intro to lit course. Having students watch the words as they hear them draws their attentions to those details. This allows students who are auditory learners, rather than visual learners, to have a different experience with the language.
After the reading, I first have the students list everything we know about the American and Jig. Because the students have read the story together, they can come up with a reasonable list. They’re also fairly quick to understand that there’s significant tension between the main characters.
Where it gets interesting is in talking to the students about how the story actually works. I always ask the students how long the conversation is – and invariably, they say “about five minutes,” approximating the time it took the “actors” to read the story. We then look at the time at the beginning of the play – forty minutes until the train arrives – and at the end – five minutes. Once students realize that this conversation takes place over 35 minutes, they are able to begin to think about the level of tension between the characters: what took us five minutes to read actually took seven times longer. That means there’s a lot of silence.
Having students shift genres like this – like having them draw a poem – is something that helps everyone find an initial interpretation of the work. The student who reads “Jig” always finds a different way to ask “Will you please please please please please please please stop talking.” And we have a much more productive discussion once we all have a place to start.
What other stories – or even narrative poems – would be good to use for this sort of genre shift?