Topics: Take one of your paragraphs/assignments below and expand them into a longer paper! Think about the themes; the gap between the adaptation and your own expectations / original work; the correlation between the original plot and the historical epoch when the adaptation was filmed; the blending of different traditions (like, for example, in the British adaptation of Dostoevsky).
Please do NOT submit previously graded work – if you are using your paragraph as a starting point, rephrase and rework it into a longer paper!
Assignments:
The Russian adaptation of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades was a mind bending film that left me fairly confused about the implications of what had happened to Hermann by the end of the film. I understood that it was supposed to be left up to interpretation to a certain degree. In keeping with its theme, it was still a maddening narrative composition. All of the information is laid out in front of the audience through the eyes of the tragic protagonist, but to a certain degree that makes it even more difficult to analyse. It robs the audience of a narrative device often key to understanding the full implications of a story; dramatic irony.
Outside of a few scenes between the woman he manipulates and the rich countess, there are very few scenes which provide the audience any critical information about the story that Hermann does not know either. One is left experiencing the narrative through Hermann’s clearly ignorant point of view, though we unaware what it is that he is actually ignorant of; it is clear that the events which are unfolding in front of Hermann are truly happening, but their nature is never clearly revealed to the audience. Is it psychological madness brought on by the guilt of causing the death of an old woman? Did it grow alongside the terrible greed and obsession that slowly became more evident throughout the story? Or was it a paranormal haunting? These are questions which as an observer I was forced to consider alongside Hermann, and which maddeningly I could not. Pushkin proves himself to be a master at leaving one sure about the events which transpired on screen, but anxious about the reasons why.
In Choosing the Right Card: Madness, Gambling, and Imagination in Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Gary Rosenshield compiles several essays by different scholars who analyze the narrative strategies that Pushkin employs to manipulate the psyche of both his characters and his audience in such a way. Caryl Emerson claims that he uses “fragmentary codes”, which in simpler terms refers to incomplete literary evidence which points to one conclusion but by no means excludes the opposite. Pushkin fills The Queen of Spades to the brim with these fragmentary codes, pointing in every direction but remain consistent with any other conclusion one might come to. Whether one believes Hermann’s madness to be a result of the paranormal or of psychiatric dysfunction, the problem would not be finding enough evidence to support that conclusion, it would be finding enough to disprove any other.