Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation By Abigail Burnham Bloo ...

subordinated linear, what-happened-next questions to interpretive, what-is-this-telling-me questions.

In the same way, Tamara S. Wagner uses the dated qualities of the film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes that resurrect Holmes and Watson to enlist them in the fight against Hitler in order to impart to her students “a heightened alertness to any such agendas” (p. 219), whether they appear in Holmes adaptations or the Holmes canon. Such an approach emphasizes not only the medium-specific features of fiction and film but also the culturally specific reading practices that different versions of the Dracula story and the Holmes franchise by turns foster and challenge. It restores the sense of nineteenth-century culture as a repository of strategies for making sense of the world for both the Victorians who lived in it and the modern students who labor to understand it. In reawakening a sense of cultural values as equipment for living for both a culture’s members and its inheritors, it allows students to recognize nineteenth-century values more recent cultures have chosen to accept, transform, or reject in favor of values they find superior. It also empowers students to begin making such choices themselves and to consider critically the ways their own culture is doing so. Perhaps more importantly, it recognizes the classroom as the pivotal site where reading practices and cultural values are negotiated.

Sue Thomas’s argument that working to develop “film literacies” around race, class, and empire has enabling effects in the classroom (p. 231) can readily be applied to other literacies—novelistic literacy, literary literacy, and cultural literacy—that have only in modern times begun to be identified as specific modes of literacy rather than literacy itself. Teaching literature and film, as these chapters powerfully demonstrate, does not amount to teachers merely transmitting their collective knowledge; rather, it requires them to hold their aesthetic, political, and cultural beliefs up to the challenge of constant reframings, their students’ as well as their own. Just as literary and film scholars’ research is dedicated to teaching each other better ways to read, so teaching has the power to sharpen scholars’ own communal literacy by