ENG 5138 Spring 2024

Since its conception, 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 create a space to explore how the cinema 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 Hemingway adaptation, The Killers, 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 and Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

Subsequently, we will also consider how some literature and culture was influenced by film or adapted itself by “seeing cinematically,” before the cinema even fully evolved. Additional study of the intersection of film studies, ecocritism, and biological concepts of adaptation in the natural world. Selected film/adaptation theory will be read, including writings by André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Charles Darwin, Sergei Eisenstein, Kamilla Elliott, Thomas Leitch, Linda Hutcheon, and Robert Stam.

Films for study may include: Adaptation, Alice in Wonderland, The Birds, Blade Runner/2049, Contempt, The Killers, Nosferatu, Rope, Suspiria, Under the Skin, Vivre sa Vie.