PULiculAr Reform: Watching literature

Progress is, to paraphrase one of the great reformers of the last century, a fire that will consume everything that tries to resist it.

The digital age is also a time in which younger readers are becoming increasingly distanced from the book as an object, which would not necessarily be a bad thing if they were reading required, classical and contemporary texts from the screens they mostly use for other types of content and other media in which they believe that text is not essential. Yet it always is; it simply needs to be discovered in a way that is meaningful and understandable to young people.

This is why we decided to base this year’s PULiculAr Reform—which we consider an expanded version of Pop Reading—on the relationship between prose and film, that is, on film adaptations of works of Croatian and world literature, most of which are part of the school reading curriculum.

Critics, screenwriters, directors and writers whose books have been, or will be, adapted for the screen will talk about adaptation as a specific technique of transforming a literary work into a screenplay. Logically, in order to talk about an adapted work at all, it is inevitably necessary to talk about the literary work from which it originated. And, consequently, we believe that at least some of the programme’s visitors will decide to find out what came before the opening credits of, say, *Odyssey* or *The Glembays*.