novel. One outcome of this is to introduce a ray of hope in the potential of love
between the characters George and Curly’s Wife that subtly disperses the relentless
misery and prejudice of the original novel.
The transformation of the entity ‘character’ and ‘novel’ is reflected in the function of
the CD-ROM in the classroom. The focus of the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ and the task of
the students are no longer to come to know themselves through literature or to engage
with questions of morality or identity. The analysis shows the reshaping of the entity
‘novel’ by a shift towards ‘reality’.
The move from page to screen also reshapes the actual characters of the novel. The
modes of gaze, movement, gesture, body posture and voice quality each contribute in
specific ways to the re-shaping of the characters of the novel, in particular the
characters George, Lennie, Crooks and Curly’s Wife. For instance, the character
George is re-presented as rational, stable, in control and adult through the
representation of his steady gaze, his still body-posture, his lack of movement, his
slow and soft gesture, and his regular voice tone, pitch and rhythm. In contrast the
character Lennie is re-presented as emotional, unstable, out of control, dangerous and
child-like through his fast and forceful gesture, his constantly shifting body-posture,
unfocused gaze and faltering stutters. At some points the multimodal resources of the
CD-ROM serve to polarise the two characters, and in other instances they serve to
connect them. The visual positioning of the viewer through the distance and angle of
the representation, the editing and composition of the video clips and the images on
the CD-ROM foreground the designer’s empathy for the character George and
combine to objectify the character Lennie. In this process the character George is
realised as active and the character Lennie is realised as passive and yet potentially
dangerous. The multimodal ensemble of the CD-ROM indicates a ‘designed support’
for the actions of George and reveals the stark tensions between the two characters.
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