Melissa gave us a clip of the Disney version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” today. See below for a few other film adaptations. How might you film this story if you were a Hollywood producer? What effects would you want to create, and which scenes might you emphasize?
Questions to consider:
- What is Irving saying about gender in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”?
- The myth/history theme will be useful, as well. What is Irving saying about colonial America?
- What metaphorical dimensions do you see in this story? If myth is, as we said earlier, a building block of culture or a story to live by, what is Irving telling us about how we ought to live (or how we ought not to live), particularly as Americans?
- Let’s keep watching for examples of Romanticism, especially Gothic imagery. Intertextual links with “Thanatopsis” and “Rip Van Winkle” will add depth.
- Today we considered the ways in which Irving uses his preface and postscript to help nudge readers toward a metaphorical or symbolic reading. What is he trying to accomplish in the postscript to this story?
- Some folks have been blogging about freedom as a unifying theme for the course material. What do we learn from Irving about freedom in this story?
Burton’s film (1999) takes considerable liberties with the text of Irving’s story, but does preserve the spirit of mystery and humor in the narrative:
Schellerup’s film (1980) plays up Brom Bones’s character considerably more than Burton’s. Just for fun, whom do you prefer as Ichabod Crane: Johnny Depp or Jeff Goldblum?
And, of course, there is the Disney version (1958):
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