Sarah Cutts

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Reid, Amy

Keywords

Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative, Proust, Marcel, Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, Swann's Way, Adaptation, Feminism

Area of Concentration

French

Abstract

This thesis examines the cultural ramifications of adapting two canonical ("high culture") novels to a medium traditionally associated with low culture: Proust's Du cote de chez Swann and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In this project, I consider how an image-heavy medium affects the original narrative, the reception of both of these adaptations in France and the U.S., and the cultural exchange between the original texts and their adaptations. For most of the twentieth century, anglophone comic books and their francophone counterparts, bandes dessinees, were dismissed as works that were at best merely children's entertainment and at worst manifestations of a destructive commodity-based consumer culture. In recent decades, however, the rise of the "graphic novel" has corresponded with increased critical attention on the comics genre. Reading these adaptations side-by-side, I evaluate how comics as a postmodern art form affects the reception of Proust's Combray and how the feminist ideologies of Pride and Prejudice are presented in its contemporary comic adaptation. Film scholarship, such as Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," provides a useful template on the study of image's influence on narrative. The comparison of these two works also serves as a springboard to a discussion on the arbitrary divisions between "high" and "low" culture and the spaces traditionally inhabited by conventional novels and comics. Is a comic adaptation legitimized by the cultural position of the original text? Is the original novel commodified because of the connotations of the graphic narrative form? Ultimately, while the accessibility of the comic form can lead to an increased interest in the original text after reading a well-researched adaptation (Stephane Heuet's Combray), it can also contribute to a shallow adaptation produced primarily for a company's economic interests (Marvel's Pride and Prejudice).

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