LITERATURE AND FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES: IS THERE A RELATION?

Abstract

Apparently under the shelter of the metaphor that they are also "languages," other media than those of words alone have become a familiar part ofthe stock-in-trade of the modern department of English in high school and university. To those who have venerated literature as high art, this development has often come as a double shock, questionable both in its logic and as to the integrity of its judgment. Louis Dudek, poet and teacher, holds that the idea of art is little understood and has been seriously undermined in our time, while he acknowledges the probability of the presence of art in unaccustomed places; and he defends the tradition of high achievement that has ever survived the onslaught of the great waves of reaction that characterize its history.