Back to Square One: Revisiting the Classics In its postmodern fascination with the politics of representation, (1) contemporary cinema has established a fruitful dialogue with the so-called "canonical" literature of the past. Contemporary audiences might consider ourselves lucky: we are offered not only critically productive angles of vision of certain classics but, equally importantly, pleasure. A pleasure which is manifold; on the one hand, we are allowed to re-visit a multiplicity of texts that some of us have experienced through the intimacy of reading; on the other, we are given the opportunity to inscribe our own reading in an ongoing cultural dialogue, sharing it with that of the director, the critics, the audiences. Further, there is the mere (scopophilic) enjoyment of the multiple semiotic possibilities which representation offers. Still further, we are allowed to reflect on the ways in which film adaptations of classic novels might become postmodern artefacts where copies become originals and originals become copies, thus not only blurring the distinction between these two categories, but effectively establishing a cultural exchange which successfully brings the classic back to our days. From Shakespeare to Jane Austen, E.M. Forster, or Virginia Woolf, what critic Harold Bloom described as 'the Western canon' (1994) has been visually represented in recent decades (the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s have been particularly prolific in this respect). The work of one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens, could not remain silent in the fin-de-siecle dialogical interchange. (2)
