Motion pictures and literature

This thesis covers the entire range of British and American film adaptations of
Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, as no cumulative study on this larger selection
has been done thus far. However this will not be the only objective of this thesis, as I
create a link between the author’s life to her novel, between the novel to the early
criticism, and the criticism to later adaptations, forming a chain of transformation down
the ages, to the original novel. By linking the adaptations to the earlier reception of the
novel, a change of social interaction will be uncovered as one of its reasons for surviving.
These examples of adaptation will be shown to be just as relevant to popular culture
history as its original inspiration. This is the result of an unfolding movement of change
and mutation, where each adaptation pushes to connect with the past and future.

Walt Whitman's visual imagination was influenced by paintings, panoramas, and photography. His expansive vision reflects changes in methods of perception. Whitman was also an influence on early filmmakers, like Dziga Vertov. Vertov's "Kino-Eye" theory and Whitman's poetry reflect each other in their attempts to attain a "fresh" perception, to see the world "photogenically." Consequently, there is more than just similitude between Whitman and cinema. In fact, both are meant to be seen. Although the idea of reading Whitman "cinematographically" has been mentioned by some critics, none has suggested how this reading process is to be enacted or understood by the reader. The Reader Response theory of Wolfgang Iser is used to show that the reader, when encountering a text, is involved in a process of ideation, during which mental images are influenced by and derived in part from textual schemata and indeterminacies. The cinematographic reading is, then, highly imaginative, resulting in the creation of a "virtual" text. When examined, it can be shown how Walt Whitman's catalogues intend to carry the reader along in a process of "indirect" ideation during which the structures and images of the catalogues become realized by the reader's imagination.