CAT 2025 Slot 2 VARC Question & Solution
Question
The four sentences (labelled 1, 2, 3, and 4) given below, when properly sequenced, would yield a coherent paragraph. Decide on the proper sequencing of the order of the sentences and key in the sequence of the four numbers as your answer.
1. ‘Literature on screen' suggests something more capacious and defining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature.
2. Even though a growing number of films eligible for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium borrow that material from print journalism, franchise characters, television series, comic books, video games and toys, academic studies of adaptation remain stubbornly attached to literature as cinema's natural progenitor.
3. It is as if adaptation studies, by borrowing the cultural cachet of literature, sought to claim its institutional respectability and gravitas even while insuring adaptation's enduring aesthetic and
methodological subordination to literature proper.
4. Beneath this contradictory notion of film adaptations as not merely hybrid texts but texts holding dual citizenship in two modes of presentation is an even more pervasive legacy that haunts adaptation studies: the assumption that the primary context within which adaptations are to be studied is literature.
Solution
Determining the Most Logical Sentence Order
The paragraph discusses the idea of 'literature on screen' and examines the assumptions that shape adaptation studies, especially the privileged position given to literature over cinema.
Step-by-Step Logical Flow
The most coherent sequence of sentences is:
1 → 4 → 2 → 3
Here’s how this order works:
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Sentence 1 functions best as the opening because it introduces the central idea of what “literature on screen” means.
- It frames the debate by suggesting that adaptations may belong to both cinema and literature.
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Sentence 4 follows naturally by developing this idea further.
- It highlights a key assumption in adaptation studies: that literature is the primary framework for understanding adaptations.
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Sentence 2 then provides clear evidence of this bias.
- It points out the contradiction that although films now adapt material from many non-literary sources, academic studies still treat literature as cinema’s natural source.
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Sentence 3 works effectively as the conclusion.
- It explains why this contradiction persists, arguing that adaptation studies depend on literature’s cultural prestige to gain legitimacy.
- This reliance keeps cinema in a secondary position.