The Literary Canon Inside and Beyond Academia: Adaptations and Engagements

Abstract

ABSTRACT While mobile phones, computers, and other reading devices are now well integrated to the academe, streaming platforms (like Netflix) have been increasingly making canonical texts available (as adaptations) to the audience beyond the classroom. These movie adaptations, which do not serve pedagogic functions, are appropriated into the academe recast the relationship between the text and the reader and calls into question the distinction between academic and nonacademic domains—particularly, it questions the borders of the literary canon and the text. If canonical texts constitute the literary field (Bourdieu, 199), how do digital renditions of literary texts alter the constituency of the literary canon? This article, along these lines, examines how accessing canonical literary texts as movie adaptations, as popular renditions, by nonspecialized audiences, on streaming platforms impacts the canon in question. The article argues that movie adaptation of literary texts facilitates the transposition and mobility of the literary canon from an ambit of academic ecology to a nonacademic popular culture. Adaptation, this article argues, helps in the reimagination of the literary canon within the ambit of popular culture.