ENG 3114 Spring 2022 Parker

Since its birth, the cinema and its filmmakers have constantly drawn from literary sources to create narratives in the new medium. In this course, we will study classic and contemporary theories of film adaptation, borrowing as well as breaking from the concept of fidelity, to understand how film engages with literature—and how literary stories are deformed and reformed through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of text-to-film adaptations and explore their wider adaptation “networks”; some will be more classically defined, such as Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers (1964), while others will force us to address adaptation as a concept perhaps equal to influence, as when we study the connectivity between Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Thomas de Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Subsequently, we will also consider how some literature was influenced by film, or adapted itself by “seeing cinematically,” before the cinema even fully evolved.

Films (and relevant source texts) for study may include: Adaptation, Alice in Wonderland, Blade Runner, The Birds, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Killers, Nosferatu, Rashomon, Romeo + Juliet, Rope, and The Tragedy of Macbeth.

This course meets the Genre requirement for LMC majors.