Saturday, 21 March 2009

Pride and Prejudice: to see or not to see?

My last comment on Soojin's post "Sex and sensibility from Economist", reminded me that I also have the BBC's excellent video production of Pride and Prejudice. I like it because it follows the novel very closely, and almost all of the brilliant conversation, which Jane Austen uses to very effectively to tell her story, is included almost word for word from the novel. The producers also went to a lot of trouble to accurately depict the clothes, houses and other details from the period. 
Because it does follow the novel so closely, the full video is also quite long, at about four hours, so I'm not sure that I would want us to watch it all, but would you like to watch some of the BBC's video production? Perhaps we could watch a little once a week? 
Please leave a comment to let me know what you think. 
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On a somewhat different but related topic, "Sex and Sensibility", the title of the Economist article that Soojin blogged this morning, is a witty joke based on the name of another famous novel by Jane Austen. What is it? (Although the Economist's writers don't write strictly academic English, they do write very well educated English for a critical audience whom they assume to be well read.) 

3 comments:

  1. It seem interesting. I want to watch it.

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  2. It seems to be interesting. I'd like to watch it ^___^

    Following to Peter's last comments, I found the title that is parodied in the title, sex and sensibility, in the Korean potal site, Naver. I really wanted to know the title written by Jane Austen. The title is Sense and Sensibility(I can't change to italic..T.T), right? Um, but the title is differently transelated in Korean. If I directly transtlate the title in Korean version to English, the title is Reason and Sensibility(italic please~), so I couldn't guess the title and the parody in the title from economic. Wow, interesting,,, But I don't read the book. Someday I might to(?) read. haha

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  3. Mark can show us how to apply italic formatting, also bold and insert links in comments. It isn't difficult.

    Soojin is right: Sense and Sensibility is the title of Jane Austen's novel that the Economist used for their witty article title. It's almost, but not quite, as famous as Pride and Prejudice, and at least as witty for a title. Austen is a very humourous writer, but the humour isn't always obvious. Her choice of words is brilliant: the surface meaning is always correct and informative, usually very informative with very few words, as we saw on Friday when she managed to introduce so much so well in a very, very short first chapter, but as we are learning about poetry, there are layers of meaning that her choice of words hints at.
    I've read her novels many times, but every time I read one of them, I see more connections and layers of meaning, which is perhaps one reason that they have ranked as some of the best novels ever written in English for so very long, as they still do today. Although the Korean version of the title of Sense and Sensibility isn't wrong, it looses a lot. The OED entry for the noun (not the verb, just the noun) lists 30 main definitions for sense, many with furhter divisions. They are organised into 4 main types of definition. It would take take 27 A4 pages to print it. (I'm not going to.) And then there is the verb!

    I'll book a TV and DVD player for Wednesday, and we can watch the first 40 minutes or so, up to which we will have read by then. I think it will help to see what the novel describes.

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