Comparison Essay Example For Students

Comparison Essay Many people compare an English literary work to different movies of their time. An example of this is Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. A story about a woman transformed into a spectacular beauty pushed into royalty, but never loses her identity, is very similar to a movie directed by Don Bluth called Anastasia. Bernard Shaws play Pygmalion and Don Bluths movie Anastasia, show that one can change a persons appearance, but the person deep within has never left the surface. The two have a large array of similarities and differences. What is also fascinating is that the background of both the English writer and director are very similar in how they began. I will compare both movie work and literary work of two exceptional people. To show that readers make the meaning of literary texts, Crosman and one of his students (Stacy) read A Rose for Emily for the first time to compare each others reader response. Crosmans response, although tainted by knowledge of the story, was that Emily was an old, hateful woman that murdered and slept with a dead body. Crosman went on to say that he had viewed this story through sexist eyes in that all women are mean, menacing, and inferior to men. With a totally different look on the story Stacy missed the main points of the story but came up with some rather kind remarks about Miss Emily. Stacy compared her grandmothers life to that of Emilys which, in her eyes, was one of endurance, faith, and love. Although Stacy missed the main point of the story, Crosman believed that her response was helpful and was just as valid as his response. Crosman claimed that Stacys response helped him realize that he was wrong to be sexist in his reading and he had missed some of the good qualities in Emily. Unfortunately for Crosman, using Stacys response to prove that different reader interpretations can be valid and helpful failed. Reader response theory is based on the idea that the reader can comprehend the basics of a text. In Stacys case she didnt get the basics of the text, in fact she didnt even realize that Emily had killed Homer Barron and slept with a his dead body for years. It is impossible to have a valid comparison of responses when the fundamentals of a text are not grasped and there lies the problem with Crosmans argument. Bibliography: