The files of the characters Curly, and Curly’s wife share the image of a newspaper
cutting. The characters George and Lennie share the image of a play poster. The
characters George and Curly’s wife share the image of an envelope. Through the use
of a shared image of a hand-addressed envelope in the files of the characters George
and Curly’s wife the Dossier visually introduces the suggestion of a relationship
between them. The addressed envelope is suggestive of a romantic, secretive
relationship. The link between the two characters is also realised by the use of audio
clips in the character Dossiers. Through the visual and aural re-shaping of character
the potential for a relationship between George and Curly’s wife is presented in the
CD-ROM. This introduces a heterosexual romantic strand into the narrative that
serves to realise the vulnerable femininity of Curly’s Wife and the heterosexuality of
the character George. It also suggests a glimmer of hope (and escapism) to the ‘Novel
as CD-ROM’ that stands in stark contrast to the bleak and relentless loneliness and
realism of the original novel.
The modal transformation from page to screen does not demand these shifts in the
centrality or re-presentation of characters; rather it makes it possible to reshape the
characters and their relations, at the same time as maintaining the original novel as a
text. The reshaping of the novel occurs in the designer’s use of visual and aural
modes, while the mode of writing is used to maintain (reproduce) the text of the
original novel. The multimodal reshaping of the characters Curly’s wife and Crooks
repositions the novel for a contemporary audience. The potential to read the novel as
sexist and racist (a view expressed by some of the students on reading the novel) is
visually ‘overlaid’.
Students’ Multimodal ‘Readings’ of the Dossier
The students reading of the novel and the CD-ROM are, in the context of the English
classroom, infused with the histories of English as a school subject, the demands of
the National Curriculum, and the desire for students to identify with characters.
136
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