ABSTRACT
In historical terms, a difference in aura and prestige separates literature from film. While World Literature claims a multi-millennial tradition, World Cinema claims only slightly more than a century. The relations between film and literature have often been wary and ambivalent. Summas by their very nature, both the novel and the fiction film, are open to all cultural forms. The study of cinema becomes impoverished when it is isolated from its ecological relation to the other arts. World Literature theory has existed in a state of denial about the intimate connection between World Literature and World Cinema. The cinema, unconsciously, is seen as degraded by the company it keeps—the great unwashed popular mass audience, and with its lower-class origins in “vulgar” spectacles like sideshows and carnivals. The cinema has resources unavailable to the novel; it can literally include painting, poetry, and music or it can metaphorically evoke the techniques and procedures of those artists.
