Twentieth-century philosophic expressions in literature and film

Postmodem theory contends that the world is intelligible only through discourse. Indeed, the way we explain the world we live in-our very philosophies explaining the underlying conduct, thought, and nature of our universe-have always been communicated via the discourse of stories. This is as true today as it was centuries ago; however, the method of story-telling has changed. For many years, story-telling was an oral activity. Finally, it progressed to the written form, reaching its "heyday" in the nineteenth century. This dissertation intends to explore various philosophic expressions during the twentieth century: stories now communicated in the written mode and, perhaps more signifîcantly since the majority of people see and hear these stories in this manner, in the visual mode. The intent is to see if the story, told in one medium, communicates the same philosophic expression when told in another, i.e., to analyze the adaptation of text to cinema, cinema to text. A second intent is to suggest that cinema, often regarded as a rather banal intellectual activity, frequently regarded as the enemy of the written text, actually enhances the literary mode.