William Wyler's 1939 Adaptation of Wuthering Heights: An Attempt to Restore the Idea of America Dream.

The competition between word and image to take a priority over each other as the better medium reached a turning point by the advent of cinema in twentieth century. The resonance of competition soon faded away when critics began to study not the extent to which one film adaptation is imitating the literary work but the discursive field behind each cinematic adaptation. In this respect, the great status of each literary adaptation is readily justified. Under this purview, the mainstay of literary adaptations is controlled within a certain discursive practice. As such, the principle that pervades Hollywood literary production is tinged with the idea of American dream as the predominant discursive formation running through the whole system. Nevertheless, at the critical moment of Great depression, the necessity of encapsulating the idea of American dream was stressed more than ever since America needed to rebuild the shattered idea on which the country has been built itself. Therefore, the contribution of this paper lies in studying William Wyler's 1939 Adaptation of Wuthering Heights with respect to Michel Foucault's theory of discourse to prove that this literary adaptation is produced with the purpose of advertising the idea of American dream shattered during the Great depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]