ABSTRACT
Much as the cinema has aided literature by popularizing its texts, the cinema has indirectly helped literature departments in the sense that literature courses increasingly rely on filmic adaptations of literature to swell enrollments. The dominant attitude toward the relations between Television and Cinema on the part of the Brazilian intelligentsia, as Eli Lee Carter points out, was an Adornonian posture that condemned television as an ideological tool that alienated the masses; and an elitist attitude that saw TV as a wasteland completely devoid of legitimate culture. The issue of literary adaptation plays a special role in “minor” nations, where adaptations can become a “heritage” genre for the Global South. Adaptations can serve multiple purposes: a means for outwitting censorship through strategic allegory, advancing national prestige, or simply providing viable stories.
