Pride and Prejudice music videos
If you search for Pride and Prejudice on YouTube, you can find amongst the movie trailers several music videos compiled from clips of the newest P&P movie. My guess is that most of them were made by very young people (high school age, perhaps?), since the music they use tends to be recent pop songs. Some of these videos are generic (and often silly) Darcy-loves-Lizzie videos, but several are more interesting. Like any good work of literary criticism, they make arguments about point of view, tone and thematic material in the novel (or, at least, the movie). Some of them, like this one, work from Darcy's perspective, but most are presented from Elizabeth's. Two of my favorites present very different interpretations of Elizabeth's character; one presents her as a young, vulnerable woman trying to decipher the mysteries of social life, while another argues that Lizzie is an independent woman wondering how much of her independence it's okay to sacrifice in a relationship. Their readings of Elizabeth vary widely but are both well supported by a careful organization of the movie's "text." It seems like this kind of project might be one useful way of introducing analysis of literary adaptations--if done correctly, it would encourage students to move away from summarizing plots and toward a more thematic, topical analysis of a movie's rhetoric.


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