'Canonized bones': Film adaptation and the transmission of canonical literature

Although literary works continue to be adapted into films at a surprising rate, film and literature critics have been unable to agree on what constitutes a successful adaptation. This lack of consensus is especially confusing, given that so many critics use the same touchstone, "fidelity," in their appraisals of film adaptations. By focussing on adaptations of canonical literary texts in which ghosts exhort humans to change, this thesis explores the notion of fidelity as an ethical imperative to do justice to what has come before us.; Each chapter of this thesis is dedicated to a separate film-text, and each of these film-texts illustrates a different kind of ghost. Chapter one looks at William Shakespeare's Hamlet (as well as film adaptations directed by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda) and characterizes the most famous of literary spectres, Hamlet's father, as an "ontological ghost," that is, a ghost that, through its mere existence, sets the time "out of joint." In chapter two, the "ethical ghost," the ghost that haunts through memory and awakens the need for social justice, is examined through the lens of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Brian Desmond Hurst's film adaptation of Dickens' text. Finally, chapter three, which looks at James Joyce's "The Dead" as well as the film adaptation directed by John Huston, deals with the "psychological ghost," the fragmentation of identity produced by an identification with the other.; These texts have been chosen because they reveal clearly that adaptation is not a phenomenon extrinsic to the canonical literary work, but that rather, these texts are all, in their own ways, about adaptation. As a transformation that allows something (even a ghost) to live on in a new context, adaptation is one of the foundations of our inheritance of tradition. This thesis argues that the hospitable reception of new film adaptations of classic literary works is part of the critic's duty, and that we should also welcome new theories explaining the intricate relationships between film and literature.