| Abstrakt: |
This article proposes to take up Linda Hutcheon's remark concerning the difficulty of adapting 'verbal irony' to performance media 'when used in the showing mode' through a comparative study of Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter (1991) and Atom Egoyan's (1997) adaptation. Much of the novel's irony is produced by its complex narrative strategy, which splits the narration between four narrators who offer conflicting perspectives on people, events and situations. Because it refuses to take sides, the novel's irony is more typical of 'modern irony' than of 'classical irony'. Analysing the way Egoyan has adapted the novel's verbal irony will, thus, serve to compare both the handling of irony in, and the subtexts of, novel and film. Grounded in some of the major writings on irony, this article also aims, more generally, at identifying forms of irony specific to film and at arguing that modern irony retains the moral bent generally associated with classical irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
