ENG 4934 Parker Summer 2022

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 better 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”; from early cinema’s adaptation of the Victorian novel in Nosferatu (1922) through pulp fiction as foundational of film noir in The Killers (1964), this class will also move through units on adapting illustrated children’s literature (Alice in Wonderland, 1951), the Shakespearean play (Romeo + Juliet, 1996) and contemporary female authors (Certain Women, 2016).