INTRODUCTION

It is nearly impossible to commence this chapter without remarking upon the coincidence that Marcel Pagnol's birth in 1895 in Aubagne, Provence, occurred in the same year that his countrymen Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first public screenings of their cinematograph in Paris. Yet Brett Bowles reminds readers that this pleasing accident of chronology was not necessarily ‘a sign that Pagnol’s fate was somehow cosmically intertwined with cinema’ (2012a: 10). Bowles indicates that while Pagnol's family history did not readily suggest a nascent facility for any particular art form, including the newest, what was to prove remarkable was his success across several media and roles. For Pagnol would achieve acclaim as a novelist, playwright, film producer and director, becoming one of France's leading cultural figures of the twentieth century. Unusually for an instance of adaptation, the films examined in this chapter have not followed the familiar trajectory of novel-film, but rather film-novel-film; an adaptive journey that reflects Pagnol's identity as a multimedia author. Responding to Pagnol’s original 1952 film, itself a version edited down significantly from his desired vision of the story, André Bazin wrote that ‘in Manon of the Springs, with his inspiration finally at its peak – he gave Provence its universal epic’ (1995: 204). Hence, even before the novels that gave rise to the adaptations examined here, Pagnol and this story were inextricably associated with Provence. Pagnol later novelised his own Manon into L’eau des collines (The Water of the Hills) in 1962. Finally, in 1986 – eleven years after his death – the constituent stories of L’eau des collines were adapted as the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. They achieved both critical and commercial success, nationally and internationally, though it was domestically that they achieved their greatest box office success, running for seventy and fifty-eight weeks respectively, and selling 7.2 and 6.6 million tickets, making them the most popular films of that year (Bowles 2012a: 237). Importantly, the films were also a notable example of a concerted effort on the part of the French government of the time to support and promote cinema that foregrounded French history and culture, especially in the face of competition from anglophone filmmakers.

Sociocultural and social cognitive theories have begun to make a lasting imprint on English Language Teaching (ELT) and learning as it is undertaken and understood today across a range of contexts (Steffensen and Kramsch ). This chapter reports on a study conducted with English language learners involved in Literature Circles (LCs) over an extended period and centres on an analysis of the discourse generated within these post-reading, group discussions. The chapter begins by contextualising LCs as a vehicle for reader response and collaborative engagement within an ecological perspective to second language (L2) development. Drawing on sociocultural theory (Lantolf, Thorne and Poehner ) and its application to collaborative engagement in a language learning environment, the discourse presented undergoes an ecologically grounded, dialogical analysis. This analysis interprets examples from the group conversations as affordances for language development identified as an emergent phenomenon, co-constructed and mediated by the support of peers, the shared reading experience and relevant scaffolding. The current study suggests that this dynamic combines collaborative interaction and interpersonal communication with ecosocial processes to promote spoken L2 development, where deep processing of shared interpretation, critical evaluation, collective noticing and expression of affect are externalised within the discussions.

In 2017, in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, women, trans-and gender diverse persons1 across the creative industries (and beyond) have come forward to shed light on the prevalence of sexual assault and violence in these areas. The #MeToo hashtag, which was used extensively on social media from late 2017 when stories were being shared online as a way of demonstrating the widespread nature of sexual assault and abuse, has become emblematic of this moment. As part of this, women have been taking collective action to draw attention to the pervasiveness of this type of abuse in the music industries. For example, over 2,000 people in Sweden (Dagens Nyheter 2017) and over 1,000 in Australia (The Industry Observer n.d.) have signed open letters detailing the types of abuse they have been subjected to, and calling for change and an end to such behaviour. The Swedish letter stated that:

Reading the stories shared in these open letters gives powerful insight into how the culture of the industry encourages mistreatment of women and minimizes their experiences. For example, one contributor noted:

The stories in these letters, and others that emerged during this time through social media and other forums, have made it clear that abuse is often normalized in the music industries. This new –but not new –knowledge raises questions about the extent to which such behaviours have always been part of popular music, and how histories of this music are often written so as to ignore, excuse or even valorize such misdeeds.