William Faulkner in the Media Ecology
John Matthews (Boston University)
translated by Marta Nowicka
The full version of this article is available in Polish in the printed version of Tekstualia and in the on-line subscription.
The article analyzes (mal)adaptations of Faulkner’s fi ction in Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Sound and the Fury (1959), both produced by Jerry Wald and scripted by Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch. Both of these movies revisit the plantation South in the 1950s, and remind us that the plantation persisted as a system of production and a subject of cultural fascination through the century. The author analyzes the extent to which the adaptors alter the originals, also by using other Faulkner’s texts. Additionally, attention has been paid to the concept of „media ecology,” the status of Faulkner’s modernist texts in the 1950s and his achievement as a great chronicler of modernity, not only as a virtuoso of technique.
The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/files/6fcccbcc/matthews_john-faulkner_i_film.pdf
